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FIELD

CONTEMPORARY POETRY AND POETICS
NUMBER 63 TALE 2000

OBERLIN COLLEGE PRESS

EDITORS

Pamela Alexander
Martha Collins

Alberta Turner

David Walker
David Young

BUSINESS

MANAGER

Linda Slocum

EDITORIAL

ASSISTANTS

Catherine Bull
Adam Giannelli

Ben Gleason

Matthew White

DESIGN

Steve Farkas

www.oberlin.edu/ -ocpress

Ohio Arts Council

f A STATE AGENCY
THAT SUPPORTS PUBLIC
PROGRAMS IN THE ARTS

FIELD gratefully acknowledges support from the Ohio Arts
Council.

Published twice yearly by Oberlin College.

Subscriptions and manuscripts should be sent to FIELD, 10 North
Professor Street, Oberlin, Ohio 44074. Manuscripts will not be re¬
turned unless accompanied by a stamped self-addressed envelope.

Subscriptions $14.00 a year/$24.00 for two years/single issues
$7.00 postpaid. Back issues: $12.00 each. Contact us about avail¬
ability.

FIELD is indexed in The American Humanities Index.

ISSN: 0015-0657

CONTENTS

Rainer Maria Rilke:

A Symposium

Lee Upi ton

"Childhood": Trace-Marks

Beckian Fritz Goldberg

"Leda”: Sexual Healing

David Young

"The Bowl of Roses":

Handfuls of Intensity

David Walker

"Archaic Torso of Apollo":

The Subliminal Object

Carol Muske

"Requiem for a Friend":
Retrieving the Lament:

Red Shadows, Red Echoes
Between " Requiem " and
"Self-Portrait, 1906"

Eric Torgersen

"Requiem for a Friend":

You Must Change Your Art

* * *

Charles Wright

Cloudspeak

Thinking of Wallace Stevens at
the Beginning of Spring

Jon Loomis

In the Mirror It Is Sunday

Letter from the Cardiac Unit

Jean Valentine

Go Clear

Dannye Romine Pozvell

Wake the Tree

After Sorrow

Michael Chitwood

His Gratitude

Oscillating Fan

Billy Collins

Velocity

The Great Walter Pater

Absence

D. Nurkse

Second Marriage

A Puzzle at Saint Luke's

Franz Wright

Thanks Prayer at the Cove

The Word

Homage

Mark Irzvin

Passing

November

Marianne Boruch

I Imagine the Mortician

My Uncle Who Hated Zoos

Small Yards

Sondra Upham

Plaster of Paris Hands in a
Glass Case in the Hand
Surgeon's Waiting Room

At the Theatre

100

That Summer

Venus Khoury-Ghata

101

"My mother who recalled a
blurred-over death"

102

"The salt my mother tossed
in her oven"

103

"We stole kisses from the
holy pictures"

104

"All logic's order melted
with the roof"

Martha Zweig

105

Mistress Here

106

Widowwalk

107

Generations

Deborah Bogen

108

Visitation

Thorpe Moeckel

109

Poem with Braids in It

111

Skink

Amy Schroeder

112

right, righter, lightest

113

Homesick

Angela Ball

114

Our Institute of the Superficial

115

Our Big River

Beckian Fritz Goldberg

116

One More

117

Wren

118

Answer

Lee Upton

119

Coleridge, Again

120

Women with Putti

121

Indispensable Sign

122

Contributors

RAINER MARIA RILKE

A FIELD SYMPOSIUM

RAINER MARIA RILKE: A FIELD SYMPOSIUM

This symposium fills a gap. On the one hand, we have been
presenting translations of Rilke since 1971, when FIELD #5 began
a serialized presentation of The Duino Elegies, two to an issue. On
the other hand, we've been organizing these symposia since 1979,
and have already collected eighteen of them in the recent volume.
Poets Reading. We were almost startled to realize that we had
never done a symposium on Rilke.

While this symposium marks no particular anniversary, it
comes at a time when interest in Rilke continues to generate a
very lively dialogue among contemporary poets, American poets
in particular. Translations abound. Opinions, pro and con, are
thick on the ground. And it's clear that what Rilke means to us as
a predecessor, one of the first of the great modernists, now almost
a century away, is still being discussed, determined, and imag¬
ined. In the past couple of years we've had, just to name a few in¬
stances, Louise Gluck accusing Rilke of sponsoring American po¬
etry's narcissism; Eric Torgersen's book on Rilke's complicated
relationship with Paula Modersohn-Becker; William Gass dis¬
playing an odd combination of irreverence and worship in his
Reading Rilke, a book of lively prose and clunky translations; and
a set of new translations by Galway Kinnell ( The Essential Rilke )
and by Edward Snow ( Duino Elegies). Sales of Rilke translations,
as Oberlin College Press, which carries two titles, The Unknown
Rilke (Franz Wright) and The Book of Fresh Beginnings (David
Young), can readily testify, continue to be brisk, especially for
poetry.

Rilke's detractors, armed with biographical information, are
fond of calling attention to the discrepancies between his person¬
al life and the ideals he shaped in his poems. But which of the
great modernists has escaped the scrutiny that moves artists from
idols to flawed and interesting individuals? Pound is long since
scaled down from the heroic to the pathetic. So is Eliot. Yeats's
absurdities have been carefully set out. Frost, Neruda, Montale,
Williams, Stevens, and Moore — all of them had their shameful

moments. Rilke's shortcomings are old news, mostly fodder for
journalists who don't know quite what to say about the poems.

There's a cultist air, too, around this poet. The habit of point¬
ing out his foibles is surely a reaction, at least in part, to the urge
some naive readers have exhibited to convert him into some sort
of spiritual guru. That he encouraged this, both by his priestly
sense of the poet's vocation and by writing and publishing such
documents as Letters to a Young Poet , is undeniable.

But Rilke as New Age totem is old news as well. And it's
clear, from this symposium and from other recent discussions,
that poets read him for very different reasons. They are interest¬
ed in his unusual ways with metaphor, in his handling of gender
issues that bear on poetic identity and on the fate of the modern
self, and in the accomplishments whereby he transformed him¬
self from a fairly typical Symbolist into a vigorous, innovative
modernist.

It's no accident, then, that these essays concentrate them¬
selves around the crucial years when Rilke made that transfor¬
mation, during the first decade of the twentieth century. The ear¬
liest poem treated here is from 1903, the latest from 1908. They
belong to the time when Rilke, in Paris mostly and struggling
with issues of life and art, experienced a productivity matched
only by his great creative outburst after World War One, the one
that resulted in The Duino Elegies and The Sonnets to Orpheus. The
foundation of that later miraculous accomplishment, as these es¬
says make clear, was carefully laid in the Paris years. It came, in
large part, out of encounters with visual artists (particularly
Rodin, Cezanne, Van Gogh and Modersohn-Becker) which led
him to innovations in poetic form and poetic metaphor that re¬
main his most significant contributions to modernist poetry.

A word about translations is in order here. We have used
David Young's versions of Rilke as our main poetic texts. He is,
after all, our house translator of this poet. One exception is
"Leda," presented in the version by Edward Snow, one of Rilke's
most capable and productive translators. Another, less visible at
first, is the fact that the two discussions of the long poem, "Re¬
quiem for a Friend, the Rilke poem that has provoked so much

interest in recent years, are based on two other translations. Carol
Muske's cites Stephen Mitchell's, and Eric Torgersen's cites his
own, which was presented first as an appendix in his fine study,
Dear Friend: Rainer Maria Rilke and Paula Modersohn-Becker. So
three versions of that remarkable poem make their various ap¬
pearances here. If we had room, we would print all three in their
entirety.

At the risk of appearing obvious, we want to applaud the va¬
riety and quality of Rilke translations now available to contem¬
porary readers. If you do not read this poet in the original lan¬
guage, the next best thing is to have more than one version to
consult. Thus the work of M. D. Herter Norton, Edward Snow,
Stephen Mitchell, Robert Bly, A1 Poulin, and Galway Kinnell,
among others, is a matter for celebration rather than rivalry.
Readers are urged to look at all the existing versions of "Re¬
quiem," as well as any other Rilke text they may be strongly in¬
terested in. Whatever preferences they may develop, the result
must necessarily be a fuller acquaintance with the poem in ques¬
tion. Rilke's entry into the public domain, making him widely
available to translators, has done more to make him our contem¬
porary than anything else that has been said and done in the last
twenty-five years.

CHILDHOOD

School time runs on and on with anxiousness
and boredom, full of pauses, full of pointless things.
Oh solitude, oh slow and heavy hours. . .

And then outside: the streets glisten and ring

and in the squares the fountains play

and in the gardens all the world grows huge. —

And one runs through it all in a small suit
quite differently than others go, or went — :

Oh wonderful, odd moments, oh heavy hours,
oh solitude.

And looking out so far and seeing things:
men and women, men, men, women,
and children who are different, brightly dressed,
and there a house, and now and then a dog
and fear that can turn quietly to trust — :
oh sadness with no sense, oh dream, oh horror,
oh bottomless abyss.

And so to play: ball and top and hoop

in gardens that are softly losing color,

and sometimes to brush past adults,

blind and unruly from a game of tag,

but quieted by nightfall, walking home

with stiff little steps, held firmly by the hand — :

Oh always more elusive comprehension,
oh fear, oh heavy weight.

And hours at a time by the big gray pond,
kneeling with a little sailboat there;
and to forget it because those other sails
more interesting than yours are cutting circles,
and then to have to think about the small white
face that sank away and shone out from the pond:
oh childhood, oh disappearing images,
where to? where to?

translated fry David Young

Lee Upton

TRACE-MARKS

Childhood doesn't resist description; it swallows descrip¬
tion. Childhood calls up our desires to delineate its qualities, yet
description cannot return us to childhood's liminal strangeness.
Perhaps description cannot account for the experience of being a
child because childhood is an action that we cannot entirely re¬
experience once we have aged out of its provinces. Rather than
describing the elusive feeling-states of childhood, Rilke's "Child¬
hood" enacts the perceptual states of childhood. The poem reac¬
quaints us with the sense of what it is to be in the place of child¬
hood, the undefended place where phenomena loom large.

Childhood is a land with seemingly tight borders because of
the scheduled protections of adults. Yet childhood is also the
land, perhaps somewhat like very old age, that glimpses border¬
lessness: non-being and non-sense. Feeling in Rilke's poem is
widely variable, assuming moments of bliss and trust, but dis¬
solving toward turbulent uncertainty when seemingly the earth
is not under our feet and the depth of being has no ground:
"o Tiefe ohne Grund."

We cannot keep our childhoods, nor presumably would we
wish to, but we do retain the trace-marks of childhood's loss,
trace-marks that may be felt through Rilke's poem. There is a cut,
a channel in the soft tissues within the skull, where the poem
circles.

First published in the 1906 edition of Das Buck dcr Bilder,
"Childhood" positions the reader inside a way of apprehending
in which time is particularly mystifying. Childhood, the poem re¬
minds us, is heavy with time. Never again will time, unless under
conditions of acute suffering, be lived in such a way that we feel
its density so fully. Because we come to Rilke's poem safe from
our childhoods, we cannot fully enter the perceptual field of
childhood. The result is that while reading the poem we experi¬
ence yet again our removal from our earlier self. But this es¬
trangement in our temporal sense works within us in a paradox¬
ical manner. The poem, after all, wants us to allow strangeness.

our sense of difference, to infiltrate us. The prick of discomfort
that we may feel performs as a small mimicking psychic event
that may recall us to childhood's larger estrangement when we
have yet to grow meaning over phenomena — before we sprout
the fine down of our protective expectations.

Rilke is the poet of the great romance and horror of child¬
hood in which the child must struggle to orient himself. The child
attempts to surround himself with reliable sensory indicators. He
counts men and women. He notices what other children wear.
His methods are useful only to a point but relentlessly applied.
He lists. He compares. What's large? What's small? What's dif¬
ferent? What's the same? Who matches the child? Who differs?
My three-year-old to a man in middle-age: "You have old skin. I
have fresh skin."

"Childhood" has a pulse, a returning action. Things move,
glisten, grow. Space and time open, widening to allow the child
to recognize his own separateness. The child gathers the emerg¬
ing self in the time of solitude, clutching the power of the circle
of the self.

Through its repeated insistent sound effects and images of
roundedness, its gardens and fountains, the poem is made of cir¬
cles. The playthings of the child are circular: ball, top, hoop. The
sailboat is 'cutting circles" in the pond, which is itself another
circle. The circle of the child's face disappears in the pond's cir¬
cle, inscribing an inward movement, cutting circles upon the
mind. Implicit here are the many luminous rings of Rilke's
poems: his Spanish dancer, his carousel, his bowl of roses, as well
as the pressured dynamism of animate roundedness — whirling,
brimming, rippling.

Rilke s poetry gives the impression of an intimacy that hard¬
ly seems lost in translation, which may be why his poems are so
frequently translated and why they are responded to with such
enduring gratitude even by readers who know him only in trans¬
lation. His poetry seems to survive translation, perhaps because
the poems themselves are about translation, enacting the action
of carrying across" meaning. It would seem that translation of
one sort or another is their medium and part of their very mes-

sage, for they perform in terms of slippage, fading, opening up
and closing distances within the psyche.

We've all had childhoods but Rilke more so. The facts of his
earliest years have been rehearsed often. It was a childhood in
which he was neglected or alternately fantastically overinscribed
by parental desires, as William H. Gass describes it:

Rilke's parents had lost a daughter the year before they
begot Rene (as he was christened); hoping for another
daughter to replace her, and until he was ready to enter
school, his mother, Phia, got him up girlishly, combed his
curls, encouraged him to call his good self Sophie, and han¬
dled him like a china doll, cooing and cuddling him until
such time as he was abruptly put away in a drawer. Later,
with a mournful understanding that resembled Gertrude
Stein's, Rilke realized that someone else had had to die in
order to provide him with a place in life.

( Reading Rilke: Reflections on the Problems of Translation)

Rilke's childhood was marked by parental allegiance to a dead
child rather than to the actual child. Absence circling upon an ab¬
sence. Add this to the inevitable sense of incomprehension be¬
queathed to any child and the result is estrangement many times
over.

The final image of "Childhood," with its suggestion of Nar¬
cissus looking into the pool and gazing at his reflection, foretells
anxieties: the child's sense that his small craft (the poem, the iden¬
tity that he longs to perfect) must be compared to that of others
and may be diminished in comparison. This is a jealous percep¬
tion. From its first stanza the poem has betrayed anxiety over dif¬
ference. Nevertheless, the child's apprehension of difference is
part of his rescue, a rescue achieved through the intensity of his
own perceptions, the rescue of the child from being solely the fan¬
tasy object of his parents' will. The child recognizes himself in
part through the world's impact on his senses. Fie clings tightly to
the self that he erects among the orbiting phenomena around him.

As the child-self dwindles in the poem's final images, we are
left with the mystery and the sense of the unattainable. Child-

hood, because of the extreme difference between the child self
and the adult self, serves as a template for later disappearances.
The images Rilke creates are of animate loss, the child's toy sail¬
ing ship and his own shining face circling upon the psyche and
dissolving from sight.

Rilke's poems are intimate in a disturbing way. We may wish
to be passive, consuming his poems, but, as many readers have
noted, the poems turn on us. We are being observed. A figure or
object scrutinizes us, changing the compass points in the room
while we read. The reader is implicated, not only by the startling
challenge to change one's life of "Archaic Torso of Apollo" (with
its most appropriated, most irresistible final line) but through the
momentary testing encounters of even such brief poems as "Saint
Sebastian," "People by Night," "The Orphan's Song" and "The
Dwarf's Song." In its own terms, "Childhood" creates another
sort of disturbing encounter as the poem shows us a missed en¬
counter — our failure to meet or wholly contain that ghost child
we were, the one who glides off, bearing the cargo of childhood's
mysteries.

The final questions of "Childhood" are less plaintive than
wondering, " Wohin ? Wohin ?" We might say that at some level
this is the call of the abandoned child. More surely it is the call of
the being who has metamorphosed into adulthood and who
knows that not only his childhood face has disappeared but also
a way of experiencing the world's largeness and strangeness has
vanished. It is a cry, a repeated question, that resonates with awe
more than with grief.

LEDA

When the god in his great need crossed inside,
he was shocked almost to find the swan so beautiful;
he slipped himself inside it all confused.

But his deceit bore him toward the deed

before he'd put that untried being's
feelings to the test. And the opened woman
saw at once who was coming in the swan
and understood: he asked one thing

which she, confused in her resistance,
no longer could hold back. The god came down
and necking through the ever weaker hand

released himself into the one he loved.

Then only — with what delight! — he felt his feathers
and grew truly swan within her womb.

translated by Edward Snow

Bcckian Fritz Goldberg

SEXUAL HEALING: RILKE'S "LEDA"

Honey , 1 know you'll be there to relieve me
The love you give to me will free me
If you don't know the things you're dealing
I can tell you , darling, that it's Sexual Healing.

— Marvin Gaye/David Ritz/Odell Brown

Rilke's "Leda" appears in his volume of poems of concen¬
trated "seeing," both scientific and mystical, but unlike those
poems which contemplate a physical object — swan, panther,
statue, even the personae of Adam and Eve via cathedral sculp¬
tures — there is no corresponding tangible image for this poem.
There is only story, a myth related in various classical sources, of
the Greek God Zeus taking the form of a swan and raping Leda,
wife of King Tyndareus. As a result of this coupling and, accord¬
ing to some sources, a same-night union with her husband, Leda
gives birth to two eggs which hatch two sets of twins: Pollux and
Helen, Castor and Clytemnestra. In some versions it is Castor and
Pollux in one egg, the girls in another. Helen is the beauty who
reputedly sets off the Trojan War, and Clytemnestra later marries
and murders King Agamemnon; thus Yeats' lines from "Leda and
the Swan,"

A shudder in the loins engenders there
The broken wall, the burning roof and tower.

And Agamemnon dead.

While Yeats' poem takes the form of an annunciation, Rilke's re-
seeing (re-vision) is not concerned with the historical conse¬
quences of the encounter though both poems, to a degree, con¬
cern sexual power.

This myth has become, in contemporary poetry, part of our
cultural dialogue on gender and sexual power, from Mona Van
Duyn s response to Yeats 'Did she . . in her Leda's opening,
Not for a moment . . to Adrienne Rich's rejoinder to Galway
Kinnell's remarks in "Poetry, Personality and Death" on bestiali-

ty as trope, stating that it always seems to involve a male human
with a female animal, as in Leda and the swan, largely because
"women, at least in the imagination of men, are closer to nature."

Robert Bly comments that Rilke's "Leda" is all about "the
sensuality of lovemaking," yet I think it is difficult for a contem¬
porary woman to see the myth, in any of its versions, as romanti¬
cally or as about "lovemaking" rather than power. It is sexual pri¬
marily in the Foucauldian sense of sex being "an especially dense
transfer point for relations of power." The mystery is ultimately
where that power resides and, for Rilke, its potentially transfor¬
mative nature.

One of the remarkable features of Rilke's version of Leda is
the role of the swan which, in other versions including classical
versions, is merely a disguise for Zeus, a way for him to consort
with the woman of his whims — a ruse he's used many times,
sometimes taking the shape of an eagle, sometimes becoming a
shower of gold, sometimes a Motown record producer. Rilke sees
it as the Invisible taking visible form and in Rilke's poem it is not
a disguise discarded — it is the "truly swan" that comes to mat¬
ter, both literally and figuratively.

The poem begins with an element common to most versions
of the myth — sexual helplessness, not only Leda's (Yeats' "her
helpless breast" or Ovid's Leda "supinely pressed") but also the
male god's initial need and bewilderment. It is need that first
drives him, not simply a sexual need for Leda, but need to inhabit
a physical body, to take on visible form, and animal form, for
Rilke, is perhaps the purest. What happens is that the god van¬
ishes or disappears ( verschzvinden ) into the swan "all confused"
( verwirrt ). This is the first penetration in the poem and the god is
confused in it, the identities of visible and invisible are confused;
he is not in godlike control. He is "borne toward" the "deed" by
the nature of the being he has entered. It is no longer, "You're my
medicine open up and let me in," — more like, ". . . Baby ohh /
Come take control, just grab hold / Of my body and mind. . . ."

But the sense of helplessness is mutual. In the third stanza
Leda, because she has recognized "who was coming in the swan"
is also "confused" ( verwirrt ) in her resistance. And this follows a

curious moment in the second stanza in which we are told that he
(god/swan) "asked one thing" (Snow's italics). We know, of
course, in the classical versions Zeus does not "ask." Rilke clear¬
ly intends to portray Leda's consent as she has understood the
"one thing" he needs and cannot hold it back from him, not be¬
cause he has overpowered her, but because it is something she by
her very nature must bestow.

The implication is that, here, animal and woman possess
what the male/divine do not and in the Rilkean cosmology
means that men as "bees of the invisible" have the task of trans¬
forming the visible into "the invisible vibrations and excitations
of our own nature which introduces new vibration-frequencies
into the vibration-sphere of the Universe." Essentially the poem
enacts this process.

Rilke's "seeing" poems involve a "gazing into" that hopes to
be transformed into a "looking out from" — and this "looking out
from" is a quality he associates with the animal world because

the animal presumably is without all that accounting to it¬
self and therefore has before itself and above itself that in¬
describably open freedom which perhaps has its extremely
fleeting equivalent among us only in those first moments of
love when one human sees his own vastness in another.
(Quoted by Heidegger in Poetry , Language and Thought, 108)

It is a quality that Rilke, to some extent, also associates with chil¬
dren and with women "in whom life dwells more immediately,
more fruitfully and confidently." The idea that true alienation is
a primarily male experience is characteristic of the Romantic and
the Modernist.

In order to ask this "one thing," then, the male god must
enter into the animal llmwelt. "With all its eyes the creature world
beholds / the open . . . according to Rilke s Eighth Elegy, for the
primary motive here is to look out on the Open as the animal
does and in that vastness the earth is mirrored back into us, the
invisible rises in us.

The poem is also a
Rilke saw that "artistic

merging of the creative and procreative as
experience lies so incrediblv close to that

of sex." Here, Leda reflects the traditional Romantic view of the
female Muse who has the power to liberate the male poet's artis¬
tic heat and to inspire his artistic expression, though the female
herself remains primarily "Schoos.” The swan appears as a figure
for the muteness of the poet, a role Larry Levis, in his essay
"Some Notes on the Gazer Within," ascribed to the animal figure
in many contemporary poems.

The animal disguise here is not mere ruse and, at the conclu¬
sion of the poem, no "indifferent beak" merely lets Leda drop.
When the transformation and healing of the self is completed by
the god-swan releasing "himself into the one he loved," he feels
only then "his own feathers" — that is, becomes entirely what he
is, like the animal, no longer a spectator to whom even his own
being is an issue. He is "truly swan," the visible interiorized.

Ultimately, the poem functions as a cross dressing of the
soul/self reflecting Rilke's interests in costume and disguise, the
subject of some of his prose and certainly part of his own psy¬
chological formation as the boy Rene (who became Rainer), who
was dressed as a girl by his mother in his early years and some¬
times would dress himself as "Margaret" to please his mother
after "Rainer" was naughty. It is not surprising then that gender
is something Rilke attempts to strip away, having written that
man is limited "when he loves as man only and not as a human
being," and that women will someday cast off the "mutations of
[their] outward status" and the "disguises" imposed on them by
cultural definitions and social expectations or, as the song says,
"Sexual Healing, baby . . . it's good for us."

THE BOWL OF ROSES

Angry ones: you saw them flare up, saw two boys

ball themselves into a something

that was all hatred, tumbling on the ground

like an animal attacked by bees;

actors, towering overstaters,

raging horses, crashing to collapse,

eyes rolling, baring their teeth

as if the skull was going to peel itself,

starting from the mouth.

But now you know how that's forgotten:
this full bowl of roses stands before you,
unforgettable, filled to the brim
with the utmost expression of being, bending,
yielding, unable to give, simply existing,
that could be ours: utmost for us too.

Silent life, opening and opening, no end in sight,

a use of space that takes no space away

from space that things around it need,

an existence with almost no outlines, all background

and pure inwardness, and much strange softness

and self-illuminated — right to the rim:

do we know anything, anywhere, that's like this?

Then like this: that emotion is born
from the touch of petal to petal?

And this: that a petal comes open like an eyelid
and underneath are just more eyelids, nothing else,
closed, as though they had to be asleep
ten times deeper to shut down visionary power.

And this above all: that through these petals

light somehow has to pass. From a thousand bright skies

they slowly filter each drop of darkness

within whose fiery luster the tangled group
of stamens stirs and rears erect.

And the movement in the roses — look:
gestures from such small angles of eruption
they'd never be noticed if not for the way
their rays fan out to the cosmos.

Look at that white one: it has opened in bliss

and stands there in its great splayed petals

like a Venus erect in her shell;

and the blushing one, that turns and leans

as if embarrassed, toward the one that's cool,

and how that cool one won't respond, withdraws,

and how a cold one stands, wrapped in itself,
among the opening ones, that shed everything.
And what they shed: how it is light or heavy,
how it can be a cloak, a load, a wing
and then a mask, now this, now that,
and hozv they shed it: as if before a lover.

Is there anything they can't become? Wasn't
that yellow one, lying there hollow and open,
the rind of a fruit where the very same color,
more concentrated, orangey-red, was juice?

And was unfurling just too much for this one,
because in the air its anonymous pink
has picked up a bitter aftertaste of violet?

And the one made of cambric, isn't it a dress
to which the soft and breath-warm slip still clings,
both of them tossed aside in morning shadows
near an old pool in the forest?

And this one, opalescent porcelain,
easily shattered, a shallow china cup
filled with small, lit butterflies, —
and that one, which holds nothing but itself.

Aren't all of us like that, containing just ourselves,

if self-containment means: transforming the outside world

and wind and rain and spring's great patience

and guilt and restlessness and masquerading fate

and the darkening of the earth at evening

and even the clouds that change and flow and vanish,

and even the vague command of the distant stars

all changed to a handful of inwardness.

It now lies carefree in these open roses.

translated by David Young

David Young

HANDFULS OF INTENSITY

For a long time, and particularly since the days of the Ro¬
mantics, poets have borrowed favorite categories of subject mat¬
ter from painters: the portrait, the landscape, the re-creation of
moments from mythology and history, the genre scene. They
might of course think of writing about myth or landscape with¬
out having visual treatments as models for their enterprise, but
often those models helped them conceptualize both the subject
and its treatment. We can all think of examples of poets' uses of
these painterly categories, right on through the nineteenth centu¬
ry and into the twentieth.

The poet's gesture, invoking the pictorial, may be said to
constitute an implicit challenge: knowing what we know about
the power of visual images, can we find their equivalents through
language? Can we perhaps even go beyond them? Is the imagi¬
nation a place where whole museums can be created by the ex¬
pressive power of words? Marvell, writing "The Picture of Little
T. C. in a Prospect of Flowers," and Shelley, writing "Mont
Blanc," are not proposing simply to do imitations of what land¬
scape painters do; they are using such painters and paintings as
a place from which to begin, a launching point.

But the still life? I can't find an example of a poet deliberate¬
ly undertaking to create the verbal equivalent of a visual artist's
still life before Rilke. Williams and Stevens would match him
later, but Rilke seems to have a first, with " Die Rosenschale” and
the hydrangea pair.1 These poems deliberately match the kind of
studies painters made of fruit and flowers and objects, nature
morte, as the French term it. Theoretically, the still life ought to
provide the same kind of launching point that portraits and land¬
scapes can provide, but one can understand why poets might
draw back from the idea: too much inertia to overcome, or an

" Blaue Hortensie" and "Rosa Hortensie,” in the first and second parts of
the Neue Gedichte, respectively. He also did short studies of the rose interior,
the opium poppy and the heliotrope.

idea so specific to the traditions of painting that it can never free
itself from them. Fear of failure to launch, in other words.

Rilke, then, heady and daring, full of his experiences in
Parisian galleries and museums, decides to try what no poet has
tried before. And he's pleased enough with the result that he
places it last in the great 1907 volume of the Neue Gedichte, the cli¬
max of a crescendo created by such longer pieces as "Tombs of
the Hetaerae," "Orpheus. Eurydice. Hermes," "Alcestis," and
"Birth of Venus." History moves toward myth in this sequence,
then myth moves from narrative to the captured moment and
gives way to the surprising power of the still life.

The influences are twofold: first a sculptor, then several
painters. Rodin, whose secretary he served as for awhile, gave
Rilke the injunction to study anything — panther, carousel, ar¬
chaic torso, flamingo — until it yielded up its whole meaning and
being. The chosen thing merged, in effect, with the artist's own
sensibility, which was in turn dissolved — almost threateningly
at times, Rilke discovered — in its empathic union with the thing
being scrutinized. Subjectivity, which was both the great strength
and the great weakness of Symbolist art, is turned inside out at
such moments. It reveals its power but it also abandons
its own borders and sense of separate identity. Negative capabil¬
ity: ecstatic unions with unlikely or little noticed objects and
creatures.

If Rodin had presented the theory, it was Cezanne who had
revealed the practice, especially with respect to still lifes. along
with other contemporaries like Van Gogh and Matisse. Rilke's let¬
ters on Cezanne show him absorbing the twin lessons of the
artist s immense patience and his deliberate involvement with
mundane or inconsequential subjects:

. . . he uses his old drawings as models. And lays his apples
on bed-covers which Madame Bremond will surely miss

some day, and places a wine-bottle among them or what¬
ever happens to be hand. And (like Van Gogh) he makes his
"saints" out of such things; and forces them — forces them —
to be beautiful, to stand for the whole world and all joy and
all glory, and doesn't know whether he has succeeded in
making them do it for him.

(Letters on Cezanne, tr. Joel Agee, p. 40)

Cezanne's work ethic and risk-taking merge, for Rilke, with his
arbitrary and unlikely subject matter, his contempt for grandeur.
No wonder Rilke was tempted to try making still lifes of his own.

Add to these influences that of the gifted painter Paula Mod-
ersohn-Becker, the friend and rival (and sometime lover? We will
never know) who was discovering modernism alongside Rilke,
sometimes just a little ahead of him. She had begun to produce
powerful, hieratic images, in the manner of Gauguin. Some were
portraits and self-portraits; some were still lifes. Her recognitions
pushed his, and his loss of her, with the accompanying guilt he
felt at surviving, fortunate in his male privilege, was devastating,
as "Requiem for a Friend" demonstrates. Paula painted with an
abandon that Rilke wanted to match in his poems. She lost her¬
self, as he acknowledged, in the integrity and completeness of
her artistic commitment. He wanted no less than that for his
own practice. Could he make a still life in which he could lose
himself?

Many of the Neue Gedichte (the hydrangea pair included) are
of course quite formal: quatrains, sonnets, and the like. The ones
that eschew that connection to tradition are sometimes the ones
that show the poet trying hardest to escape from the constraints
of his art as he had practiced it earlier and his own self-control as
he had hitherto understood it. It is as if there is no time for rhyme
or traditional form in the gathering urgency of his response. Thus
it is that such poems as "Requiem for a Friend," "Orpheus. Eury-
dice. Hermes" and this one, "The Bowl of Roses," stand out in
this period of experimentation and productivity as particular
landmarks of accomplishment, proleptic of both the style and the
content of the Duino Elegies.

How does one match with language the intensity and exper¬
imentation with which the Fauves and Post-Impressionists paint¬
ed? The answer lies in a new treatment of the figurative, of
metaphor. Just as visual intensity, arresting in its unique render¬
ing of what is seen, can be the hallmark of the risk-taking painter,
so a boldness with metaphor, already sought by the Symbolists
Rilke had emulated, would be the poetic equivalent. And as the
new styles of painting foregrounded and explored the very na¬
ture of their own artistic medium — line, color, shape, paint itself,
and the acknowledged and exploited fact of a three-dimensional
world on a two-dimensional surface — so figuration, the basis of
poetic thought, would need to re-examine and revalidate itself.

In well-known poems from the Neue Gedichte like "Spanish
Dancer," Rilke had brilliantly refigured the figurative, giving it a
new status and meaning. That poem begins by comparing the
dancer to a kitchen match, flaring up when lit. It completes itself
by having her stamp out the fire as she brings her dance to its
close. The flame comparison has grown and metamorphosed
throughout the poem. But the point of the fire trope is not just
that it is sustained, but rather that fire and dance, along with
other incidental comparisons — hands and arms to snakes, cas¬
tanets like rattles — become part of some larger whole. The tra¬
ditional relation of subject to figure is revised and we find our¬
selves in a place where such relations and such terms as
metaphor and trope, with their implications of rhetorical orna¬
mentation, don't suffice to characterize the experience we are
having.

To put it another way, the poem is as much a poem about fire
as it is a poem about a dancer. Any hierarchy that would put one
abov e the other is a relic of an older way of thinking. Such cate-
goi ies have been surpassed. What Rilke partly means by the
new in New Poems is that people haven't used language and
thought process in this way previously, at least not so consistent-
1\ and purposively. It s a different way of viewing the world and
a different way of expressing that viewing. It will ultimately re-

define the human relation to the rest of existence, destroying po¬
litical and religious hierarchies, and challenging anthropomor¬
phism. And in "The Bowl of Roses" Rilke will break through to an
expression of that new relation, prefiguring his own accomplish¬
ment in the Duino Elegies. Metaphoric relationships will now ar¬
ticulate an equality of being that will allow a "lowly" still life, a
"mere" bowl of roses, to express everything that might need to be
said about the human relation to the rest of existence. Treat
metaphor radically enough, one might say, and it will reward you
with a new physics and metaphysics!

Why flowers? Reopening the familiar avenue between the
human and the floral evokes other poets, of course. So a bowl of
roses poem is also about poetry, about a favorite trope. It's at
once worn out and full of potential. Keats can help us see that.
There's a stunning line in his "Ode to Psyche," when the speaker
comes upon the lovers sleeping in the forest. In "deepest grass"
under a "roof / Of leaves and blossoms," next to "A brooklet,"
they rest:

'Mid hush'd cool-rooted flowers, fragrant-eyed.

This line is a small triumph of musical language, but it is also an
astonishing leap into synesthesia and imaginative dilation. Terms
like "personification" and "anthropomorphism" feel clumsy as a
means of describing what is happening here. The speaker is par¬
ticipating imaginatively in the very being of the flowers, touch¬
ing his own sensibility directly to their existence. We either be¬
lieve it or we don't. It's not a question of our believing whether
flowers have eyes, whether eyes can be fragrant, or how flowers
would be anything other than hushed, or know their roots are
cool as opposed to warm. It's that our own tools of perception —
hearing, touch, seeing, smell, even the sense of weight and grav¬
ity — interact with another mode of existence in a way that is in¬
stantly persuasive. That is the level of intensity and purpose.

achieved occasionally in Keats and other predecessors, which
Rilke attempts with the roses. Reopening our relation to the beau¬
ty, ephemerality, openness, and rootedness of flowers invokes a
poetic tradition while also engaging a painterly one.

Roses are chosen here because they particularly pose the
problem of seeing a familiar thing in a fresh way. They have been
too much written about, too regularly wrested round into sym¬
bols of love and beauty. By taking them on instead of, say, irises
or anemones or peonies, the poet confronts the problem of the
still life and the problem of the human-floral interaction in the
most challenging fashion possible.

Rilke has an early poem, around 1896, a piece of generic ro¬
manticism really, that opens "Do you know that I am winding
weary roses / in your hair which soft a sad wind stirs?" (" Weisst
du, dass ich dir miide Rosen flechte / ins Haar , das leis ein weher Wind
bewegt — "). So he is rewriting himself here, among other things,
and he will continue to come back to the roses, in one of the finest
of the Sonnets to Orpheus ("Rose, growing throne of yourself"
[II— 6] ) and even in his own epitaph. The fact that roses have such
a long history among humans, that they are so much the product
of our cultivation and breeding, will help, in the long run, to
strengthen and sustain the creation of that empathic magic we
find in the line from Keats.

He begins with violence. The speaker addresses a "you" (du)
who has just seen two boys fighting. Already the handling of fig¬
urative language is startling and extravagant. The comparisons
feel as though they match the energy and confusion of the fight,
pushing each other aside, building in intensity. But the strategy
seems clear. We will turn toward the roses from a kind of bewil¬
dering opposite. The fact of human violence will be counter¬
poised to its possible alternatives, hidden in the bowl of roses,
waiting for the speaker s meditative unpacking of them.

Why boys? Because they can mature. They still represent
human potential, are still in the budding stage. They can of

course take their violence on into manhood, visiting it on their
families, their enemies, themselves; but they still have also the
potential to outgrow it, to find what the roses have to offer them
instead.2

The poem now slows to a leisurely, meditative pace, relish¬
ing its subject. The second and third stanzas marvel at the collec¬
tive meaning of the roses. They are "the utmost expression of
being" and therefore an irresistible model both for the artist and
for any living human. They partake of paradox — "a use of space
that takes no space away / from space that things around it need"
— and they seem inimitable: "do we know anything, anywhere,
that's like this?" Thus they represent what we might be, but they
also surpass that representation, leading us forward toward the
ideal.

Now we begin to move into close-up, into detail. We learn
that the touch of petal to petal is the birth of emotion. We find the
petals likened to eyelids, and that leads toward an insight about
their self-illumination: that it was born of the deepest possible
sleep which, in turn, attracted and then distilled the light that
dwells in them. But this light is now indistinguishable from dark¬
ness. Inside the rose, these two great opposites have become one.
Sleeping is waking, darkness is light. So "utmost of being" is a
place that takes no space and in which oppositions are resolved
and united. How will that affect metaphor? It will mean that
metaphor, which depends on the combination of likeness and dif¬
ference, the world rhyming with itself, also points beyond itself, to
the vanishing of difference.

^William Gass misreads this opening in his very uneven study Reading
Rilke: Reflections on the Problems of Translation (Knopf, 1999). He says of the
fighting boys: "Bullyboys, actors, tellers of tall tales, runaway horses —
fright, force, and falsification — losing composure, pretending, revealing pain
and terror: these are compared to the bowl of roses" (4-5). But this is simply
wrong. As the poem makes clear, the roses are a contrast, the alternative to the
violence: "But now you know how that's forgotten: / this full bowl of roses
stands before you." The roses are everything else. No wonder Gass finds the
poem's opening "oddly violent and discordant" (5). He has missed its funda¬
mental rhetorical strategy.

To reinforce this, Rilke devotes the next small stanza to a
kind of microcosm/macrocosm effect: the smallest angles of
eruption (another translator has "vibration") fan out to the cos¬
mos, the whole universe. The implications of these simple flow¬
ers, rightly studied in their detail, are endless.

Now individual roses begin to emerge, in a riot of personifi¬
cation and figuration. They multiply their comparisons until the
speaker must resort to listing: "a cloak, a wing / and then a mask,
now this, now that." Two stanzas lead us to the longest stanza,
which opens with the rhetorical question, "Is there anything they
can't become?" and then revels in hues, tastes, eroticisms, porce¬
lain, butterflies, and yet another paradox, the rose that holds
nothing but itself, that is beyond metaphor, drawing away from
the speaker's metamorphic excess.

We are that last rose, finally. In our sense of ourselves we re¬
sist comparisons and feel our uniqueness even as we sense what
we have in common with all other beings.

These rich and beautiful stanzas, with their increasingly sub¬
tle readings of the possibilities of meaning and expression that
the roses contain, feel like the heart of the poem, its main point.
But in fact there is one more giant turn to take, one that will leave
the roses and all the figurative ingenuity behind. It turns out that
the visionary exactitude that has been applied to the bowl of
roses is a gateway to a full understanding of what we mean and
why we are here:

Aren t all of us like that, containing just ourselves,

if self-containment means: transforming the outside world

and wind and rain and spring's great patience

and guilt and restlessness and masquerading fate

and the darkening of the earth at evening

and even the clouds that change and flow and vanish,

and even the vague command of the distant stars

all changed to a handful of inwardness.

My "all of us" stretches the issue just a little: Rilke says simply
"alle,” which might be taken to mean "all the roses," or "every¬
thing." Edward Snow's version has "And aren't all that way:
simply self-containing, / if self-containing means: to transform
the world outside . . . into a handful of inwardness" ( New Poems
[1907], p. 197). But I feel sure that Rilke means "all of us" and is
here fully engaged with the question of what it means to be
human, with the question he will take up at more length in the
Duino Elegies, arriving at a similar answer.3

Rilke sees us not as cursed with consciousness and burdened
by language, separated by these things from the world around us,
as we so often feel is the case. Instead he suggests that self-con¬
sciousness and language define our uniqueness and constitute
the purpose for our existence. We are here in order to transform
the outer world into an inner world, creating in the process the
same marriage of opposites, sleep and waking, light and dark,
that is to be found in the interior of the roses. Language does not
hamper us in this task; it is our indispensable means for transfor¬
mation, which is why Rilke can propose, in the Ninth Elegy, that
we may be "on this earth to say: / House / Bridge / Fountain /
Jug / Gate / Fruit-tree / Window." And the world does not, he
further informs us, resent this naming and transforming; it longs
for it and welcomes it.

Of course this can all be seen as special pleading, the poet's
rationalizing of his own activity, and it accounts for Rilke's sense
of the priestly austerity of his vocation, an attitude some later
poets have rather despised him for. But this is not elitist in the
way that Symbolism was, or dismissive of non-artists as so much
modernism was. And to call it narcissistic is laughable, since it
springs the trap of subjectivity and escapes, moving into the
world with visionary freedom.

Rilke's move here, as a poet, is in fact comparable to Hei¬
degger's in philosophy, finally displacing Cartesian subjectivity

Snow seems to understand that as well. In his Introduction he calls this
passage "one of the great moments of ontological redefinition in Rilke" (xii).

with the recognition that humans never act alone or experience
alone, but participate, rather, in a restless, pluralistic existence
that includes not only all their own social practices but the larger
existence — earth and sky, mortality and divinity — that sur¬
rounds their history and culture, and always has. Recapturing
something lost since Plato, poet and philosopher transform our
sense of being and welcome us into a world newly configured
and brimming with altered meanings.4

In this reconfigured understanding of human beings, poetic
language becomes continuous with all language. It is not an elite
or magical private discourse. What poets do is in fact what all of
us do, spiritually, in our myriad interactions with the world, when
we are most fully alive. We do it as children, learning the world
and its names, and we do it as adults when we are truly ground¬
ed, aware of our surroundings and the value of our senses. Rilke's
vision of our place in the world, so much like Heidegger's, is fi¬
nally as democratic as that of William Carlos Williams, who
stripped away some of the mythologizing the Germans indulged
in and then let the same vision drive him and energize his poems.

It has recently become almost a reflex to begin any review or
account of Rilke with a catalog of his numerous failings. It's per¬
fectly fine to rail at his snobbishness and his personal shortcom¬
ings. We surely don't want to make him a saint. But it's important
to recognize that the core of his vision, articulated here as he
shows us that “It now lies carefree in these open roses,'' offers
every human reader a way out of the curse of self-consciousness,
the sense of separateness from the rest of existence, and the
much-discussed frustrations that attend the relations of signifier
to signified. Using a painter's mode and conventions, taking
modernism s invitation to embrace excess, risking absurdity in
his claims, he poses a question — aren't all of us like that? — that
we ignore at our spiritual peril.

For a good account of Heidegger's crucial role in resolving the philosoph¬
ical dilemmas associated with traditional metaphysics and traditional subjectiv¬
ity see James G. Edwards' The Plain Sense of Things: The Fate of Religion in an Age
of Normal Nihilism (Penn State U. Press, 1997). See also David Abram's fine book.
The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More Than Human World .

ARCHAIC TORSO OF APOLLO

We've never known the legendary head
where the eye-apples ripened. But
his torso glows still, like a candelabrum
in which his gaze, turned down,

contains itself and shines. Otherwise
the breast-curve wouldn't blind you so, nor would
the hips and groin form toward that smile
whose center held the seeds of procreation.

And then this stone would stand here, short and broken,
under the shoulders' clear, cascading plunge
and wouldn't ripple like a wild beast's fur

and break with light from every surface

like a star: because there is no place

that doesn't see you. You must change your life.

translated by David Young

David Walker

THE SUBLIMINAL OBJECT

During several years of my childhood I had a recurrent ex¬
perience of the uncanny. I would awake from deep sleep with an
extraordinarily vivid impression of having held something in my
hand. This impression was not in the form of memory as we usu¬
ally think of it, but rather as what Stanislavsky in his instructions
for actors called "sense-memory." I was unable to "remember"
what I had been dreaming, nor could I identify the object I'd held
by translating the experience into the rational categories of shape,
weight, or texture. Rather, it was as though my hand itself remem¬
bered what it had held, by retaining its elemental imprint: the ob¬
ject itself had disappeared, but its trace remained as a distinctly
palpable presence just beyond the reach of my waking mind. As
the experience recurred, it began to feel familiar and comforting,
but also hauntingly elusive, as I sought to pursue the ghostly
essence before it slipped beneath the surface. I felt somehow that
if I could only identify the object — which by this point had at¬
tained mythic proportions — something crucial would be re¬
vealed, but of course it never happened. Only much later did I
realize that the experience was important to me precisely because
of its elusiveness, enabling the thrill of inching my way beneath
the radar of clarity and logic toward a realm of pure being.

My childhood experience resonates for me with the experi¬
ence of reading Rilke in at least two different ways. Studies of the
poet have quite rightly emphasized his importance in leading the
transition from the ethereal and spiritualized world of the Sym¬
bolists to the more precise and hard-edged territory we identify
as Modernism. Rilke's attention to the work of Rodin and
Cezanne helped him understand that poetry could profitably
focus on the stuff of ordinary life, that commonplace objects with
all their flaws and inconsistencies could reveal as much or more
than idealized essences. But objects in his work are never simply
objects, any more than they are in the work of later poets like
William Carlos Williams and Marianne Moore. The fact of Rilke's

urgent attention,
trates the object's

the intensity of his gaze, animates and concen-
presence, so that a luminous and almost arche-

ty pal sense of significance emerges from it. Objects in his poetry
are simultaneously palpable and ghostly, both there and not-
there, essence and self-transcendence in one.

The other connection I draw between my childhood anec¬
dote and Rilke's work is more general and perhaps more idio¬
syncratic. Often in reading a Rilke poem I experience it vividly,
with an acute shock of recognition that makes it feel absolutely
true — and yet I find it difficult to identify what its subject is, or
even to say with any precision what I think the poem's "about."
It is of course a truism that much modern poetry is only "about"
itself, or about the experience of reading it, yet there is no poet of
which this seems more true than Rilke. There's always much to
think about in a Rilke poem: the sheer density of the language, the
complexity of the imaginative design, invite and even require the
use of rational faculties. And yet I often feel that Rilke's words
are merely the means by which I approach the subliminal condi¬
tion which they evoke; the essence of the poem is a pre-verbal
and uncanny experience of which the text seems an echo, like an
earthquake known only by its aftershocks, or a dream-object by
its ghost-impression in the hand.

Both these qualities are exemplified in "Archaic Torso of
Apollo," the opening sonnet in the 1908 second volume (of two)
of Rilke's Neue Gedichte. It is one of his better-known short lyrics,
thanks largely to its striking final sentence, which I suspect is
rarely considered in the context of the whole poem. On one level
the subject of the poem is quite straightforward: Rilke examines
the ancient Greek statue named in the title. But it functions only
nominally as description: the reader gets only a generalized sense
of what the object actually looks like (hence scholars' inability to
identify any particular statue as the subject). The poet has some¬
thing much more visionary in mind: the radical disparity be¬
tween the solidity and stillness of the object and the sense of
fierce vitality which it evokes.

This disparity has partly to do, of course, with the inherent
paradox of representing divinity in human form, but also with
the current fragmentary condition of that representation. From
the title and first line on, the statue's materiality is emphasized: a

lump of stone subject to the ravages of time, missing its head,
limbs, and genitalia, it has been stripped down to its essential
form, beyond particularity. Rilke begins by noting absence: the
fact that the head is missing deprives us of witnessing the beau¬
ty of Apollo's face and the naturalness of his features, as evoked
in the striking image of his eyes as ripening apples. But paradox¬
ically, this very absence seems to infuse what remains with ener¬
gy: the gaze which would otherwise be directed through the sun-
god's eyes is turned down and concentrated (the metaphor is
apparently that of a shade that contains and diffuses the light of
a gaslamp, though "candelabrum" presumably also invokes the
more ancient rituals of candlelight and sacred illumination), so
that it emanates through the body itself, seeming to infuse the
whole of the torso with life.

Rilke's grammar here is particularly interesting: the two long
central sentences are framed in the subjunctive, calling attention
again to the disparity between what might be and what is. If
Apollo's gaze were not turned down and inward, if the statue
weren't so infused with concealed energy, the breast-curve
wouldn't be so "blinding," nor would the arc at the loins be so
erotically compelling. Otherwise the fragmentary torso would be
simply a "short and broken" bit of stone. Here also an important
shift takes place: the "we" of the beginning of the poem ("We've
never known") has become a "you" ("wouldn't blind you so"), as
the statue's impact becomes more personal and immediate. This
highlights a further turn of the poem's central paradox: while the
statue's power is presented as though it emanated entirely from
within, Rilke of course knows that what makes that power mean¬
ingful is the human intelligence that intuits it — in other words,
the ability to respond empathetically to the power of art. Apollo
was the sun-god, but he was also god of poetry and the imagina¬
tion, and both these functions are central to the poem's vision.
Distant as we are from classical idealism, the values of Apollon¬
ian culture are only available to us in broken form: the head and
the seeds of procreation" are missing. But rather than reacting
with melancholy or nostalgia (as other early modernists like
Hardy and Eliot were inclined to), Rilke suggests that if we fully

open ourselves to what remains, however ghostly or fragmentary,
we can be fulfilled and completed by it.

And in the sestet, that process is enacted with blazing speed.
The marble torso begins to pulse disconcertingly with energy:
plunging in a clear cascade beneath the shoulders, rippling like a
wild beast's fur (here the appeal seems as least as much
dionysian as apollonian), exploding with light. In German this is
all unpunctuated, heightening the sense of phantasmagoria as
one clause leads inexorably to the next. Under the shared gaze of
poet and reader, the solid object almost entirely transforms itself
into palpable, kinetic life. And then, in a final, ravishingly abrupt
movement, the gaze is turned back on us, on you. A colon and a
"because" ( denn ) specify a logic that leaves us no way out; the vi¬
sion of the animated torso presses inevitably to the conclusion
that "there is no place / that doesn't see you." This is the point
where asking "why" or "how" seems pointless, and explication
irrelevant. The boy reaches for the object no longer there, and in
the process discovers another realm of being. Opening yourself to
the sacred mysteries of godhead or art — and for Rilke the two
were never far apart — is exhilarating and often healing, but it
also requires making yourself vulnerable to the world.

You must change your life.

REQUIEM FOR A FRIEND

I have some dead, and I have let them go

and been surprised to see them so good-natured,

making themselves at home in death, so easy,

so different from the reputation. Just you, you come

back; you graze me, haunt me, you try

bumping things that will shiver and ring,

to give you away. Oh, don't take from me what I've

slowly learned! I'm right; you're wrong

if you think you need to feel homesick

for anything that's here. We change these things,

transfigure them; the world isn't here, we mirror it

into our own existence as soon as we perceive it.

I thought you'd made more progress. I'm dismayed
that you would get confused, come back, who did
more transfiguring than any other woman.

That we were terrified by your death — no, that
your hard death interrupted us, darkly,
tearing the time beforehand from the aftermath:
that's our concern; putting that back together
will be our job. But that

you too were terrified, that you're even having

some terror now, there where terror has no meaning;

that you'd give up any piece of your eternity

and come back here, my dear friend, here,

where everything's still not come to life;

or that out there, where everything's infinite, overwhelmed

and inattentive in your first encounter,

you somehow didn't grasp the greatness of it all

the way you grasped each single thing on earth;

that from the orbit you'd already entered

the mute force of some old upset

should drag you back into our counted time — :

this often wakes me up at night

like a burglar, breaking in.

If 1 could say you've only come

peacefully, out of kindness, generous abundance,

because you are so sure, so self-possessed,

that you can scoot around anywhere, like a child,

with no fear of places where anyone can do

bad things to you — but no: you're asking something.

That goes right down into my bones, cuts like a saw.

An accusation, as if carried by your ghost,

pursuing me when I withdraw at night

into my lungs, into my bowels,

into the last poor chamber of my heart, —

that wouldn't be as bad as this dim asking.

What is it that you want?

Tell me, am I supposed to travel?

Did you leave behind some object that is suffering,
something that wants to come after you?

Must I go visit some country

you never saw, though it was as close

as the other side of your senses?

I want to travel its rivers, go ashore,

ask about its oldest customs,

stand talking with its women in their doorways

and watch as they call their children home.

I want to notice how they wear

the landscape there, doing the old work

of fields and meadows; to hanker after

being led before their king;

want to charm their priests with bribes

to lay me down before their most important idol

and lock the temple doors . . .

Then when I've learned a lot.

I'll simply watch the animals, till something
in the way they turn and move

enters my own limbs and joints;

I want to have a brief existence in their eyes
that take me up and gently let me go,
relaxed, making no judgments.

I'll have the gardeners name the many flowers for me
so I can bring back proper names in pots,
beautiful remnants of a hundred or more odors.

And I'll buy fruits, fruits that contain
that country still, even its skies!

Because that's what you understood: full fruits.

You used to set them out in bowls before you
and weigh their heaviness with colors.

And you saw those women too as fruits

and the children, just as though from inside out,

expanding into the shapes of their existence.

And finally you saw yourself as fruit,

took yourself out of your clothes; carried

yourself to the mirror, let yourself into it

right up to your gaze, kept the gaze large before it,

and did not say: that's me; no: this is.

And so incurious was your gaze at last,
so unacquisitive, so truly vowed to poverty,
it didn't even need you any more: holy.

That's how I want to recall you, the way

you presented yourself, deep inside the mirror,

far from everything else. Why come any other way?

Why deny yourself? Why would you have me think
that in the amber beads you wore around your neck
there was still something heavy, that heaviness
that never exists in the serene beyond of paintings?

Why seem to show me some evil omen by the way you stand?
What makes you lay out the contours of your bodv
like the lines inside a hand, making me see them
only as some outline of your fate?

Come into the candlelight. I'm not afraid

to look the dead in the face. When they return
they have a right to stand there in our gaze
the same as other things.

Come here; and we'll be quiet for a bit.

Look at this rose on my desk:

isn't the light around it just as timid

as the light on you? It shouldn't be here either.

It should have bloomed or withered out there in the garden,
without involving me, — now it goes on like this,
and what is my awareness to it?

Don't be afraid if I begin to grasp it now:
oh, it's rising up in me, I have to
grasp its meaning. I'd have no choice,
even if it killed me. I do see why you're here,

I understand exactly. The way

a blind man grasps a nearby object, feeling it all over,

I feel your fate, and know no name for it.

Let us grieve together, that someone

took you right out of your mirror. Can you still cry?

You can't. You turned

the strength and pressure of your tears

into your ripe gazing, and you were changing

all of the juices inside you

into a strong existence that would rise

and circulate, unseeing and in equilibrium.

Then chance stepped in and took you, your last chance,
back from your farthest progress, into a world where juices
insist on having things their way.

Not all at once. It didn't tear you fully;
at first it only tore a piece. But then
around this piece, day after day,
reality gathered, making it heavy,
until it took all your attention;

you had to go to it and break in pieces
according to the law, yourself, with effort,
spending your entire self.

And from the night-warm soil of your heart
you grubbed the seeds up, seeds still green,
from which your death would sprout: yours,
your own death to your own life.

And then you ate them, your death-seeds,
as you would any others, ate the seeds
and found an aftertaste of sweetness
you hadn't intended, sweetness on your lips,
you: already so sweet within your senses.

Oh let us grieve. Do you know,
when you called your own blood back
from its incomparable orbit, how unwillingly,
how hesitantly, it returned?

How it resumed life's narrow little cycles,
all confused. How mistrustfully
it entered the placenta, suddenly
all tired out from the long way home?

You drove it on, you pushed it, dragged it
up to the hearth, the way you'd drag
a group of animals towards sacrifice;
and wanted it, despite all, to be happy.

And finally you succeeded: it was happy,

and it came forward and gave up. And you thought,

because you had grown used to other measurements,

that this would only be a little while;

but you were back in normal time now,

and normal time is long. And time goes on,

and time expands, and time is like a relapse

into an illness.

How short your life was if you compare it
to those hours when you sat there, bending
the lush forces of your own lush future

down toward the child-seed within you
that was becoming fate. Oh heavy work,
work that surpassed your strength. You did it,
day after day, dragging yourself forward
to pull the lovely weaving from the loom
and use the threads all differently.

And finally you had heart enough to celebrate.

Then, because it was over, you wanted a reward,
just like children when they've had to drink
some bittersweet tea to make them better.

This is the way you rewarded yourself:
because you were too far apart from everyone,
as you still are; nobody could have guessed
what the right treat for you would be.

You knew it. You sat up

in that same bed you'd given birth in

and a mirror stood before you, one that gave

everything right back to you. Now everything was you,

and right up front, and anything deeper was just deception,

the lovely deception of any woman who likes

to put jewelry on and combs her hair and changes.

And then you died as women used to die
in the old days, died in the warm house,
died the old-fashioned death of women lying in,
women who are trying to close themselves
back up again but can't, because the darkness
to which they've also given birth
comes back, pushes its way in, and enters.

Oh shouldn't they have found

some wailing women for you? Women you can pay
to howl the whole night through, when it's too quiet?
Rituals, please! We no longer have enough
rituals. They've all been talked away.

That's why you've had to come back, dead,
and here, with me, review some grieving.

Can you hear me grieving? I'd like to fling my voice
out like a cloth across the remnants of your death
and shred it to pieces until everything I say
goes dressed in rags from that torn voice, goes freezing.

If mourning were enough. But now I must accuse:
not the man who took you from yourself
(I'll never trace him, he's like all of us),
and, still, I accuse in him: the man.

If somewhere deep within me rises up
a sense of having been a child I still don't know,
maybe the very purest essence of my childhood:

I don't want to know it. Without even looking.

I'll make an angel from it and then hurl it

into the front rank of crying angels, angels who remember God.

Because this suffering's gone on too long,
no one can stand it, it's too heavy for us,
this crazy sorrow caused by phony love
that builds on its traditions like a habit,
and calls itself a right, luxuriant from injustice.

Where is one man who has the right of ownership?

Who can possess what cannot hold itself

but just from time to time can catch itself

and, blissful, throw itself again, the way

a child throws a ball? As little as the general can possess

the carved Nike on his vessel's prow

when the mysterious lightness of her godhead

suddenly lifts her into the bright sea wind:

that s how little one can call a woman back

who, seeing us no longer, goes on forward

along some narrow strip of her existence,

miraculously, without a misstep:

unless of course he has a bent for guilt.

For this is guilt, if anything is guilt:
not to enlarge the freedom of a love

with all the freedom we would wish ourselves.

We need, where we love, just this:

to let each other go; for holding on

is something we do naturally, it takes no practice.

Are you still there? What corner are you standing in?

You knew so much about all this

and got so much accomplished, going along

open to all things, like a breaking day.

Women suffer: to love is to be alone,

and artists realize sometimes, in their work,

that they must keep transforming, where they love.

You began both; and both exist in what
your fame, detaching them from you,
begins to disfigure now.

Oh, you were well beyond any fame. You were

unobtrusive; you had softly, quietly,

taken your beauty,

the way one takes a flag down

on the gray morning of a working-day,

and wanted nothing but a good long spell of work

that's left unfinished: in spite of everything, not finished.

If you're still there, if in this darkness

there's still a place in which your spirit

quivers and floats on the shallow sound-waves

of one single voice, raised alone at night

in the air that moves in a high-ceilinged room:

hear me; help me. You see, we slide back

not knowing that we're doing it,

back from our own achievement

into ways we don't intend or want, in which

we're trapped, as in a dream,

and where we die, unable to wake up.

No one goes farther. Anyone who has lifted
his blood up high in a long spell of work
can have this happen, he can't keep carrying it

and it falls back from its own weight, worthless.

For somewhere there's an ancient hatred
between our normal life and the great work.

That I may see into it, and say it: help me.

Don't come back. If you can stand it,
stay dead with the dead. The dead are busy.

But help me in a way that doesn't harm you,

the way what's distant sometimes helps the most: inside me.

translated by David Young

Carol Mitske

RETRIEVING THE LAMENT: RED SHADOWS,

RED ECHOES BETWEEN "REQUIEM FOR
A FRIEND" AND "SELF-PORTRAIT, 1906"

(All quoted poem excerpts are from The Selected Poetry of Rainer
Maria Rilke, edited and translated by Stephen Mitchell)

As if there exists a kind of "Etiquette for Ghosts," Rainer
Maria Rilke begins his strange, beautiful and confounding poem
"Requiem for a Friend" with a plea to the spirit of this deceased
friend to stop "haunting" him in unconventional ways. His other
"dead" are no trouble, he says:

I have my dead, and I have let them go
and was amazed to see them so contented,
so soon at home in being dead, so cheerful.

These cooperative dead know the limits of their acceptability.
But the eponymous friend — the dead woman, Paula Moder-
sohn-Becker — refuses to be polite, even seems deliberately
clumsy, crashing into things and unnerving poor Rilke:

Only you

return, brush past, loiter, try to knock
against something ...

What is there about the memory of this lost woman that so un¬
settles Rilke? There is guilt, sorrow, but mostly an astonished, ag¬
itated, involuntary remembering, like a reflex, a tic of recall that
he cannot control:

I thought you were much further on. It troubles me
that you should stray back . . .

I recognize this agitation. 1 have not been able to stop thinking about
this unearthly but oddly grounded poem for years — ever since I
first read it. Years ago I found reference to Modersohn-Becker in

footnotes, biographies — I found Adrienne Rich's forceful poem on
the subject of this woman and her friend and fellow artist, Clara
Westhoff. (Rich's poem, in The Dream of a Common Language, speaks
in Modersohn-Becker's voice, addressing Westhoff.)

Paula Modersohn-Becker was a love interest of Rilke's at the
artists' colony, Worpswede, around 1900. Clara Westhoff, whom
Rilke later married, was also a love interest there — and all three
were friends. At the time, however, it does not seem that Rilke
took either woman artist seriously, apart from that "love inter¬
est." (His monograph on Worpswede, published in 1903, does not
mention either woman — and his letter of introduction, written
much later to Rodin on Modersohn-Becker's behalf, described
her as "the wife of a very well-known German painter.") Rilke
married Clara Westhoff and Paula Becker married Otto Moder-
sohn, the "well-known German painter" (who was in fact a com¬
petent, somewhat known painter) against her better judgment.
Rilke had a child with Westhoff and after a while, he left her and
the child. Clara handed the child over to relatives and went back
to her old life. Paula Becker had a daughter by Modersohn and
died just after giving birth in 1907. Perhaps because of their sense
of the transience of human relationships, and their own inability
to "stay," the three managed somehow to remain oddly connected,
meeting in Paris after their youthful artist days.

Rilke's subject in "Requiem for a Friend" is the "woman
artist" — that tortured being whom he knew first-hand — watch¬
ing as she struggled to reconcile two powerful opposing forces,
motherhood and artistic passion. Despite his own ambivalence
and guilt, he understood this battle in an intuitive way — per¬
haps better than any other man — or rather, any other man who
is a poet.1

Ne\ ertheless, Rilke rather shamefully played down his connection to
PMB in “public" statements, even after writing "Requiem for a Friend" in
1908. Perhaps out of deference to Otto Modersohn, he does not “name" Paula
in his poem as he names, prominently, other dedications — but he goes on
to refuse the Becker family request that he comment on her journals — and
late in life, in an interview, he denies that he ever knew her work well.

I open a book by Gillian Perry, entitled Paula Modersohn-Beck-
er, Her Life and Work, a study of the artist's work, with color plates
of her paintings and reproductions of some of her drawings, as
well as excerpts from her letters and journals. A portrait of Rilke,
painted in 1906, in Paris, presents itself. Unlike Clara Westhoff's
carefully-rendered, Rodinesque, highly realistic bronze sculpture
of Rilke's head, Modersohn-Becker's portrait of the poet is jar¬
ring. It is pale, yet punctuated — flat, strange. William Gass, in
his recent Reading Rilke, says it is "unfinished," just as Rilke's
own view of his poems:

From Worpswede calls came which were not satisfactorily
answered, so Otto Modersohn, the husband who was sup¬
porting his wife in her separation from him, arrives to im¬
plore her to return. Paula's refusal to leave Paris, her insis¬
tence on divorce, frightened Rilke, who stopped sitting for
his portrait and ducked — as if guilty of some indiscretion
— out of sight. The painting remains as unfinished as his
self-portrait poem suggests his great work was. Neverthe¬
less, it is boldly signed PMB.

Gillian Perry disagrees on the matter of the portrait's supposed
"unfinished" state:

The painting of Rilke, with its emphasis on the two dimen¬
sional canvas and simplified features, marks an important
development in Modersohn-Becker's portrait style.

I would side with Perry here — because of the bold signature, yes
— but also because one has only to look at a couple other por¬
traits of Modersohn-Becker's of the period (including a self-por¬
trait) to see that this "unfinished" air was deliberate. And some¬
thing more. Something "haunted" each of these portraits, a kind
of stylistic comment. PMB chose to encircle Rilke's eyes, nose,
lips and shoulders with red "outlines" — giving him a ravaged
yet hyper-animated look, a sort of bloodshot body halo, infra-red
body lipstick. Gass says that these red outlines are Modersohn-
Becker's specialty — but they are not — or not entirely. She
seemed to have picked up this technique from studying Van

Gogh — in particular, his "Camille Roulin" of 1888. Because she
was a serious, surprising artist, she was making a great master's
experiment her own — because this odd "red shadowing" ex¬
pressed exactly what she wished to express about her subjects,
most especially Rilke.

Few critics of Rilke, or of "Requiem for a Friend," have
looked at PMB's paintings. She was, it is true, occasionally deriv¬
ative, but her perspective is always thoughtful, engaging, and
often completely original. Some of her work is deeply moving.
She was given to "commentary" on her subjects — these "re¬
marks" later symbolized by the red lines. Motherhood is a theme,
but her mothers and children are not sweet like Mary Cassat's —
they are fiercer, earthier, poor, but at home in their bodies. (PMB
was inspired by women in her work, though she was never part
of the turn-of-the-century Women's Movement. She saw her
struggle as an artist as solo and personal — though she mourned
the lost chances of women artists in her journal, including her
own. When she died suddenly while holding her newborn daugh¬
ter in her arms, on her first day "up" after the birth, she cried out
the German word "Schade" — "Shame" or "What a shame.")

In 1906, when Rilke sat for the "outlined" portrait, he was
also writing his own "Self-Portrait, 1906." Things were calmer
now among the three friends. The old "love interests" had ebbed
and surged. Modersohn-Becker had declared, in her journal, her
"preference" for Clara over Rilke. In a formal letter to Westhoff
written as early as 1901, she stated her disapproval of Rilke's ca¬
sual wielding of male privilege — and Westhoff's acquiescence.
"From your words, Rilke speaks too passionately/' she said. She
chastised her friend for giving up her identity:

I know little about you two, but it seems to me that you
have shed much of your old self in order to lay it at the feet
of your king, like a cloak for him to walk over. For yourself,
for the world, for art, and for me as well, I would like you
to wear your gilded mantle again.

By 1906, Westhoff had perhaps regained her mantle. Certainly,
Rilke seemed no longer her "king"; passion had cooled — but

some intensity still clung to all three when they met. Rilke and
Modersohn-Becker, in Paris, spent long days together.

Gass' offhand linking of PMB's portrait of Rilke with his self-
portrait poem is provocative. Extending that link — by which I
mean reading the poem as one looks at the portrait — is illumi¬
nating. It is possible to imagine that the 1906 portrait was a de¬
liberate visual representation of the "Self Portrait, 1906" poem.

The stamina of an old, long-noble race
in the eyebrows' heavy arches. In the mild
blue eyes, the solemn anguish of a child
and, here and there, humility — not a fool's,
but feminine: the look of one who serves.

The mouth quite ordinary, large and straight,
composed, yet not unwilling to speak out
when necessary. The forehead still naive,
most comfortable in shadows, looking down.

I believe (though I have no proof — other than the portrait's own
arched brows and "naive" forehead and straight mouth, seriously
exaggerated, both washed out and heightened by the artist's irony)
that Modersohn-Becker was "painting" Rilke's poem: in effect, a
mirror of his own self-portrait. I think the two friends had come to
that intimate (yet distanced) a dual perspective. She saw and
painted about him what he saw and wrote about himself, though
"interpreted" by her. Unlike Cezanne's canvasses (which they both
admired) which "revealed the inner character of the subject"
through luminous surfaces, Modersohn-Becker "recorded" the sub¬
ject in two-dimensional flatness and outlined the salient features,
"mantled" in introspection — how she "saw" Rilke's self.

This, as a whole, just hazily foreseen —

never, in any joy or suffering,

collected for a firm accomplishment;

and yet, as though, from far off, with scattered Things,

a serious, true work were being planned.

"Self-Portrait, 1906" (tr. Stephen Mitchell )

PMB's red re-iteration signaled what was "hazily foreseen," out¬
lining the "scattered things." In effect, she painted the second
stanza of the poem over the first. He is "collected" only in the
hazy red outlines — in fact, the portrait looks as if the features
Rilke described in the first part of his self-portrait poem, have
been emptied ; his eyes and mouth gape, as if waiting to be filled.

Just so, Rilke "answers" her visual questions in "Requiem for
a Friend." I have read this poem for years as another Rilkean
"Eurydice Returned" meditation — or as an extraordinary mani¬
festo of grief and empathy for women — a glittering indictment
of male possessiveness and power, a didactic lyric, pure Rilke.

But for the first time, I find myself reading the poem as
Rilke's total identification, his admission of another Self wholly
into the poem, not as "Other" but as " Ich ." He is mirroring and
absorbing (as Modersohn-Becker mirrored him); he is painting
her self-portraits. And this is the "retrieval" of the "lament."

That's what you had to come for: to retrieve
the lament that we omitted.

Paula Modersohn-Becker appears in the poem stepping out from
"deep inside the mirror," from the false mirror of his regard, in
which he has "cherished" her — now she steps out (or he pulls
her out, as he says), reminding him of his debt to her.

At first, he interrogates her presence, imagines her "home¬
sick for "anything in this dimension" — protesting her return to
(and out of) "reflection" — his play on words — for these reflec¬
tions are but "Things," humanly transformed, and not "real," he
says, going straight for the painterly image of "the polished sur¬
face of our being."

Because he claims to have no understanding of why she has
returned, he is aghast at her mute pleading. She has not come out
of kindness or abundance" (a familiar "country" of feminine

surplus) thus he must "travel" to find out why she silently
pleads.

Where does he travel? He travels into and within her paint-

ings, her self-portraits. His list of "destinations" are the exact
subjects of her paintings: women, mothers, children, workers in
fields and meadows, animals, "small clay pots" — and at last,
"fruits."

And here, Rilke strikes red-gold:

For that is what you understood: ripe fruits.

Then:

And, at last, you saw yourself a fruit, you stepped
out of your clothes and brought your naked body
before the mirror, you let yourself inside
down to your gaze; which stayed in front, immense,
and didn't say: I am that; no: this is.

Thus she was not "doubled," as in painting — she existed within
the mirror. But here is the crucial point — she did not see herself
in the mirror, she saw (and this gaze remained "in front") the
" this is ," the subsumption of the ego into Existence. This retreat
of the dead artist into the mirror had satisfied Rilke aesthetically;
he had admired her in memory, in the glass of his regard. (In fact,
he admired this self-obliteration as the essence of art.)

But something with weight — the "heaviness" of her amber
beads (a necklace she wears in a self-portrait, echoing red-gold)
is the touchstone that allows her to materialize in this world
again. And again, there are hints of the "blood" lines drawn
around and about things:

What makes you read the contours of your body
like lines engraved inside a palm ...

And the blood-imagery recurs:

Ah, let us lament. Do you know how hesitantly
how reluctantly your blood, when you called it back,

returned from an incomparable circuit?
how hesitantly, it returned?

Here Rilke is imitating her "red-shadowing" — he is painting her,
as she painted herself. Here he launches himself on her "incom¬
parable circuit" — into death then back. Then he goes so far below
the surface, into her body, that he follows the blood from her
heart throughout her circulatory system — and draws the red
lines' uncharted progress — into the placenta, into the mother's
blood as it changes into the blood/food of the fetus.

And in this weird protraction of the painter's gaze, he actu¬
ally does what he means to do when he says he will "travel" for
her: he becomes her, even as she gives herself up in the process of
reproduction. He understands now that motherhood is death —
not only literally, in her case, but figuratively, to the woman
artist. In this shocking identification, his horror and anger take
the form of rather showy condemnation of the entire male sex,
who live beyond this blood-split, who live with no red shadow
within.

Paula Modersohn-Becker has not painted this last portrait of
her motherhood/death — Rilke seeks to accomplish it for her —
because she has died in "the lovely deception of anv woman,"
pretending that her feminine lot — combing her hair, trying on
jewelry, dying in childbed — is acceptable.

Now he confronts the lie in the mirror and understands at
last what it means to "retrieve the lament." She has not grieved
for herself, he has not grieved for her motherhood. The poem
leaves him there, trying to paint, face to face with her in the mir-
ror confirming the lie — trying to re-draw it. (Remember, she
does not say "I am that" to her reflection in the mirror, she says,
as a mother, as nature, "this is.")

Rilke calls out for help and hopes that the "soundwaves" of
his voice will locate where her spirit "resonates." But:

Anyone who has lifted
his blood into a years-long work may find

that he can't sustain it, the force of gravity
is irresistible, and it falls back worthless.

The blood falls back, back from "work" back from the years of
our dying, the work of art, of traveling the incomparable circuit,
of identification and gestation.

For somewhere there is an ancient enmity
between our daily life and the great work.

He claims this loss for all artists, men and women.

There is PMB's own "Self-Portrait with Hand on Chin" —
also painted in 1906, the year of the Rilke portrait — and finished
in 1907, just before her death. In the portrait, her features are out¬
lined like Rilke's — red-stained — eyes, lips, nose, neckline and
between her fingers. In this self-portrait, her eyes look haunted,
startled — and the fingers are lifted to the chin in a gesture of
hesitation, nearly a silent warning. There is something so enor¬
mously still and yet exaggerated about the expression that I can't
help but imagine that this is the image of Paula that Rilke saw be¬
fore him. The "infra-red" line just at her scalp, as if just under the
surface the blood is on fire — is terrifying.

And the "lament" is ongoing. Though he asks her to return
to the dead "if she can bear to," he also asks that she continue to
return his gaze within the mirror of painting and writing, within
himself.

He has failed her. But he has also tried harder (he might say)
than any other man, to have retrieved the irrevocable lament. In
the end, he continues to call after her, abject, like a child calling
(most terribly, after all he's seen!) for its perfect mother.

But help me, if you can without distraction,
as what is farthest sometimes helps: in me.

But Rilke may be saying with that final "in me" that she has en¬
tered him now — that he is pregnant with her — and that her in-

ternalized presence, though actually dead and "farthest away,"
can assist his vision ("... hilft: in mir "). His own great lie in the
poem about "letting go" ("We need, where we love, to practice
only this: / letting each other go. For holding on / comes natu¬
rally; we do not need to learn it") is obviated by the profound
lesson he learns before our eyes in this transubstantiative "Re¬
quiem." This poem, it seems to me, is about nothing if not hold¬
ing on.

Eric Torgersen

YOU MUST CHANGE YOUR ART

Can “Requiem for a Friend" have displaced even the Sonnets
to Orpheus and Duino Elegies at the core of our American obses¬
sion with Rilke? It is very prominent in Robert Hass's introduc¬
tion to Stephen Mitchell's first volume of Rilke translations — the
success of his entire series being somehow an index of the scope
of the Rilke boom itself — and it is equally prominent in two re¬
cent books: Galway Kinnell and Hannah Liebmann's The Essential
Rilke and William H. Gass's Reading Rilke. Adrienne Rich, in
“Paula Becker to Clara Westhoff," has written a kind of — ill-in¬
formed and mistaken — refutation, and Tom Clark a parody that
begins, “Stay dead, Paula."

If I am right, we must have seized on the poem because it is
such an anomaly: In it Rilke sounds so much more contemporary,
so much more like us than he does in any other major poem. Who
can imagine writing anything like the Sonnets or Elegies? They
astound us in part by their otherness, by being so compelling
after arriving from so far off, from a world in which the poet, en¬
joying the hospitality of a princess at her castle by the sea, hears
a voice speaking to him from out of a storm. In the Requiem Rilke
writes the first person in a highly personal way, using all his
rhetorical skills to persuade us — as a measure of the poem's sin¬
cerity — that he speaks in his own voice about his own life, his
own feelings and convictions, to an actual woman, Paula Moder-
sohn-Becker, about whom, or whose fate, he cares deeply. As fa¬
miliar as this sounds to us, it is anything but Rilke's ordinary pro¬
cedure. He believed, and affirms in the poem his belief, that art is
impersonal, far beyond self and desire, on the other side of the
mirror, ineffably present but unreachable. But he has somehow —
and I will be asking how — been caused here to write a poem in
a voice so assertively personal that, despite our academic training
and awareness of theoretical difficulties, we no more think of it as
that of “the speaker" than we do the voice of, say, “Kaddish" or
the most autobiographical poems in Life Studies.

In case anyone does not remember, the poem imagines that
the painter Paula Modersohn-Becker, dead a year ago after child-

birth, has returned to Rilke in the night with some mute plea,
which he tries desperately to decipher so that he may fulfill it. He
persuades us skillfully that Modersohn-Becker's fate is desper¬
ately compelling and significant for him, her return chilling and
terrifying, and he praises her art in the highest possible terms.
But at the same time he tells her with conviction that she is wrong
to come back, and was terribly, fatefully wrong, after leaving her
husband Otto Modersohn in order (as Rilke saw it) to achieve the
greatest possible progress in her work, to allow herself to be
drawn back to him and to bear his child. "I am right and you are
wrong," he says, ostensibly only about the issue of whether she
could be right to come back after death, and then proceeds to lay
out, as defenses, with an urgency that makes clear that he feels
under assault and profoundly endangered, his most treasured
principles. For the artist, the demands of art and those of life are
irreconcilable, and the artist must choose those of art; for the
woman artist, designed for giving literal physical birth, this is
particularly cruelly so; art is impersonal, and art-objects are of a
perfect otherness; it is possible and desirable to die the one indi¬
vidual death that flows from one's individual life, for which that
life has prepared one; the outer world of objects and actions has
lost its primacy to the inner world of the human soul and heart;
love is not holding but letting go, not togetherness or possession
but mutually supported solitude and the granting of freedom;
men are incapable of it.

We should not fail to notice, then, that despite the highly
personal voice, the chillingly dramatic ghost-story mise en scene, a
laige part of the poem s content, however passionately expound¬
ed, is pure doctrine, conceived before the poem was written and
expressed elsewhere both before and after its writing.

1 have written a book about the relations, in life, between
Rilke and Modersohn-Becker, and about the continuities and dis¬
junctions between their actual life stories and the content of the
poem. It should probably be no surprise that the more one knows
about the two central figures in the poem, the harder it is to ac-
vept it at face value. From this perspective, what Rilke savs in the

poem is self-serving, defensive, and shot through with ulterior
motive. It does the historical Paula Modersohn-Becker no justice
at all; it would have appalled and infuriated her. She would have
known how to answer, as she had always known how to answer
him in life, but Rilke made his definitive statement at a time
when he could be sure of having the last word.

In a few idyllic weeks after they first met in Worpswede,
Rilke was very taken with Paula Becker, probably in love with
her; once he learned that she was secretly engaged to Otto Mod-
ersohn, their relations would never again be untroubled. From
the time that Rilke married her best friend, Clara Westhoff, sud¬
denly and more or less on the rebound, they were chiefly antago¬
nists; she deplored, for one thing, his effect on and treatment of
Clara. Rilke thought his former rival Modersohn unworthy of
Paula; both he and Clara conspired actively with Paula when she
left him early in 1906, intending to end the marriage and live and
paint on her own in Paris. Rilke felt guilty toward her in the last
year of her life because, after encouraging her to take the step,
and at first doing a great deal to help and support her, he had
pulled away from her at critical moments shortly before she de¬
cided — tragically, as he saw it — to reconcile with her husband.
Behind this guilt lay that of having paid little attention to her art
in their first five years of their acquaintance; he was very late in
discovering that she was the fine painter honored in the poem. In
letters written to her near the end of her life, he acknowledged
and apologized for both of these failures.

But the crux of the struggle between them was their dis¬
agreement over the conflicting claims of life and art, which is also
the crux of the Requiem. Rilke drew from Rodin and then
Cezanne the lesson that great artists owed everything to art and
nothing to life, and used it to justify his human failures, especial¬
ly in relation to his wife and daughter. Paula, who had the high¬
est aspirations for her art, wanted an actual, committed marriage
and children, too. Rilke believed passionately that her death
proved him right; one of the least attractive things about the Re¬
quiem on the human level is the way it says I told you so.

In her essay "American Narcissism" ( Threepenny Review ,
Winter 1998), Louise Gliick makes her own related case against
the Requiem:

No matter whose English version I read, I cannot rid myself
of the impression, in "Requiem," that this is neither a med¬
itation on a specific human life nor a poem of mourning: I
keep thinking it suits Rilke exactly that Paula Becker died;
dead she is his creature, a mirror of, or adjunct of, the self.

Paula, she says, "the living other," is "erased in being memorial¬
ized."

When the poet says, in Stephen Mitchell's translation, "if
you are still here with me," I cannot help but feel that Paula
Becker is far more eagerly admitted into the poet's soul
dead than she would have been alive: alive she was volatile,
unreliable, separate in her will. Nor am I persuaded by "in
this one man I accuse: all men," by the ready identification
of the poet with the woman now conveniently absent. It is
too easy to identify with what cannot, in behavior, repudi¬
ate identification.

In Gluck's terms, we see the closed circuit of narcissism: the other
is not admitted, only a reflection of the poet's self, whose loss he
contemplates in raptly elegiac tones. (Her argument is more sub¬
tle in its details than can be done justice here.) Her case against
the poem is part of a larger case against what she sees as narcis¬
sism in recent American poetry; Rilke's influence, particularly in
longer poems, and especially the Requiem, is identified as a cen¬
tral source. Rilke, Gliick says, is a dangerous influence, and I
think that she is right in this, too. As he calls us to take our art

v\ ith the utmost seriousness, he has a way of going to our heads,
of making us take our selves too seriously — of causing what Jung
calls psychic inflation. In my own experience, the letters and jour¬
nals including the letters to an awestruck fan that were later
compiled and published as Letters to a Young Poet — have this ef¬
fect more dimly than the poems themselves. If, among the poems,
the Requiem has this effect more than others, I would say that

this is so precisely because in it he seems so much more like us
than he usually does, and because as a result we see Rilke the
man far more directly than we do in any other major poem. The
sight of Rilke the man, as opposed to Rilke the poet, is often far
from edifying.

And after such knowledge, what forgiveness? Seeing
through so many of the Requiem's omissions and compromises,
can we still see it as a great poem? Still love it?

I think so. But doing so requires that we break the spell of
Rilke's monologue, his argument, and attend to the entire poem
as a kind of drama of which that argument is a part; that, in other
words, we look beyond what it says to what happens in it. In
Gluck's terms, if Rilke the man denies the actual Paula admission
to the poem, substituting a reflection of his ego, we may yet find
that she is in fact profoundly present because Rilke the poet has
admitted her, not to the poem's closed argument but to its action.
If Paula, appearing in the night, has not persuaded the man that
he must change his life, isn't it she — the example of her life and
work — that has caused the poet, at least in this poem, to change
his art in contravention of the very principles he has asserted
there so vehemently?

Here is the poem's famous praise for Paula's work — first
the still lifes, then depictions of women and children, and finally
those shocking nude self-portraits — that Rilke must have seen in
May and June of 1906 when she was on her own in Paris after
leaving her husband, and he, with time on his hands after being
sacked from his position as personal secretary to Rodin, came to
her studio daily to sit for his portrait:

For that is what you understood: ripe fruit.

You laid it out in bowls in front of you

and measured out, in colors, the weight of each.

Women too you saw as fruit, and children,
impelled from inside toward their destined forms.

At last you saw yourself as fruit, you took
yourself out of your clothes and brought yourself
before the mirror, then let yourself go in.

all but your gaze, so great it stayed outside
and said not: I am that; no, said: this is.

So free of curiosity at last,

your gaze, so free of owning, of such true

poverty, wanting not even yourself: holy.

One of the most striking eccentricities of the Requiem is that,
though the shade of Modersohn-Becker, returning, is invisible,
the poem does visualize her, and does it in terms of her paintings,
in particular those nude self-portraits; a reference further on to
the amber beads she wears in nearly all of them is the first bit of
evidence that this is so. In many of her nudes of women and chil¬
dren, the models are posed holding pieces of fruit; this is also true
of several of the nude self-portraits. But one of these, uncannily
like some of her still lifes of fruit, is clearly evoked by the de¬
scription above: "Self-Portrait as Half-Nude with Amber Neck¬
lace I," the more brightly colored of two versions, in preparation
for which she had herself photographed in the pose. The pose in
the painting, though, is the reverse of the pose in the photograph,
indicating that, as with many a self-portrait, a mirror has played
a role in its creation, giving Rilke a figure for what he admires
about it. Everything else about the painting sustains this reading:
the eyes do not appear to look outward, and the body radiates de¬
sireless — selfless — and utterly realized immanence. This is the
Rilkean ideal the poem praises in Paula's work. To Rilke, in poem
after poem in these years, the mirror is not the pool in which Nar¬
cissus admired his own reflection; on the contrary, the mirror
image, untouchable, not to be entered but undeniably there, is a
fax orite metaphor for the immaculate unreachable otherness of
the true work of art.

This was an ideal for Rilke in his poems as well, yielding the
terms in which he valued those thing-poems he had written while
learning, after Rodin's example, to see. But how can we fail to no¬
tice that in this Requiem in which he expounds this ideal to Paula
he has done something not only utterly different, but utterly out
of keeping with it? Far from working to free the poem from the
ego, from desire, from the self, he has used all his rhetorical skill

to persuade us that he is making an utterly personal, subjective,
emotional statement.

Having used one painting to praise Paula in the highest pos¬
sible terms, he uses another to reproach her for the desire that has
brought her back to this world that she should willingly have left
behind:

So it is I'd keep you, as you placed
yourself inside the mirror, deep inside
beyond all things. Why come so differently?

Why disavow that, what would you have me believe:
that in the amber beads around your neck
some heaviness remained that has no place
in the mirror of a painting wholly at rest?

Why show me, by your bearing, some bad omen;
why display the contours of your body
as if they were the lines in the palm of a hand,
which I can see now only as your fate?

The last three lines of this passage make clear that Rilke evokes
here, this time in horrified disapproval, another of those nude
self-portraits, "Self-Portrait on Her Fifth Wedding Anniversary."
"Why come so differently?" he asks, shaken, before describing it;
this painting gives him the image for the Paula who has come
back from the dead with her plea. In it, draped only at the hips,
she frames a swollen belly with her two hands ("display[s] the
contours of [her] body"), depicting pregnancy or the desire for it
— and thus, from Rilke's vantage-point, foretelling her death.
Everything about this painting is subjective and personal: her
eyes meet the observer, and she blushes; one of her deepest feel¬
ings, the unfulfilled wish for a child that had played a large role
in her separation from Modersohn, is literally bared to the world.
Further, with the tip of her brush handle Paula has inscribed in
the wet paint, "I painted this at thirty years of age on my fifth an¬
niversary [lit. 'sixth wedding-day'], 1906." In the terms in which
he has just finished praising the other painting, this one is incor¬
rect and indefensible: all untransformed self, all outside the mir-

ror, all subjective, personal statement. It even has, in the inscrip¬
tion, a first-person narrator who is clearly the artist herself. In
this it is very much like the Requiem.

This is what we have to notice: the poem says that it values
an art that is impersonal and objective, out of the realm of the
ego, in that mirror where it attains an unreachable otherness, but
the poem itself is utterly different. What is the force that has
elicited from Rilke such an anomalous performance, drawn him
in this instance so far out of his usual orbit? The force of the per¬
son, the work, the example of Paula Modersohn-Becker. From this
viewpoint, it is no longer possible to say that the Other that was
Paula is not genuinely present in the poem. All that is atypical
and un-Rilkean about this poem is the measure of her invisible,
silent but powerful presence in it. A painting that is very much an
anomaly in her work has played an important role in calling up a
poem that is equally anomalous in his.

If we go beyond seeing the poem merely as the poet's state¬
ment, and see it instead as a drama in which the poet, onstage, in
response to a visitation by the ghost of someone with whom, to
put it mildly, he has unresolved issues, delivers an impassioned,
fear-driven, self-justifying monologue in defense of his life, then
it takes on far greater depth and is far more compelling. All that
is suspect in the monologue becomes part of the drama, and the
poem can no longer be faulted for it. We can no longer accuse the
poem of being defensive, complacent, closed to the actual Other
that was Paula — only the visible man on stage in it, with his des¬
perate reactions to her invisible presence.

It makes a better ghost story, too. If we look only at Rilke's
monologue, it is as if Ebenezer Scrooge, visited by the ghost of
Jacob Marley, were to lecture him about the failures and errors in
his life, persuade him of the rightness of his death, and then send
him on his way, without ever recognizing that Marley had a mes-
sage for him, one that Rilke was sometimes prepared to recognize:
Vui must change your life. On the defensive, immured in walls of
doctrine, the man who speaks in the poem turns away his fear¬
some visitor; the poem's maker, on the other hand, has made
himself deeply available, quite against his will, to the influence of

her example. That the poem convinces us that both man and
maker are indeed Rilke — that we can't dismiss it as a dramatic
monologue, a staged set-piece rather than an anguished, failed
apologia pro vita sua made in the face of terror — makes the ef¬
fect that much more contemporary and compelling. This is where
the poem's depth and complexity, its anguished tension, its great¬
ness lies.

Charles Wright

CLOUDSPEAK

A long south wind from the Gulf of Mexico sweeps words
From a thousand tree leaves into the color of night.

They will not return.

Like clouds, they drift toward their own occasions.
Like clouds, they are out of here
Silently, no promise, no rebuke.

Their shadows safe in their back humps, their meanings the same —
Unwritten, unlooked upon, unheard,

cloud talk, dreary mumble.

Not one of them gives a damn for us,

Who'd hoped, at least, a couple — a sentence, a stanza —
Might settle themselves in our ink.

Well, not a chance, Ace.

Once gone, they're twice forgotten.

Like weather, and move from the west to the east, wordheads,
Thermaled and ill-lit in the night sky.

Nothing can keep them from flying.

THINKING OF WALLACE STEVENS
AT THE BEGINNING OF SPRING

There is so much that clings to us, and wants to keep warm.
Familiar things — the blue sky.

Spring sun,

some dark musician chording the sacred harp.

His spittle of notes

Pressed violets in his still darker book of revelation.

Why do they stay so cold, why

Do the words we give them disguise their identity

As abject weather,

perverse descriptions, inordinate scales?

The poem is virga, a rain that never falls to earth.

That's why we look this way, our palms outstretched,

our faces jacked toward the blue.

Jon Loomis

IN THE MIRROR IT IS SUNDAY

and the new poem's reducing itself to sex and death,
as they all do, if that's a reduction, which maybe it isn't.

Back arched, one slim wrist behind her neck, she bites
the fat black plum — bright wedge of late morning sun

through the curtain-gap, golden fuzz on her thigh.

Nice little breakdown I'm having, late morning,

late summer, James Brown on the boombox —
good God — the day unwinding around us,

movie spilled from its reel. Year of the vain promise,
car wreck, day lilies bent from last night's rain.

No more dog metaphors, I keep telling myself.

Oh arrhythmia, three-legged dog — ten years

you've dactylled along at my side, followed me
out to the mailbox, parked your sorry ass at my feet.

Now I'm weepy from too much xanax

(the juice is red, the juice runs down her arm).

the gteen silk panties phosphorescing on the floor.
I don t know what it means to wake up anymore,

as if I d taken the wrong train — the landscape
rushing past the window terribly foreign,

terribly new. She bites the plum. The juice runs
down her arm. In the mirror nothing's changed.

the driveway steams, a mockingbird riffs —
half-bar of woodthrush, lick of spotted wren.

In the mirror it is Sunday, the breakfast plates
conspire in the sink, the day-moon's thin rationale

chalked above the pine-tops. In the mirror it is Sunday
but the poem won't pay attention — it's in love

with the plum, the red juice, her small, sharp teeth . . .

LETTER FROM THE CARDIAC UNIT

Cigarettes. Drinking. One last hit of acid
back in 1989. Who knows why my heart
jitters off on its own like this —

not the tanned cardiologist, not the pretty intern
who, late last night, pushed a KY'd finger
up my ass for reasons of her own

(my heart, I tried to tell her, half asleep
and stoned on xanax — it's my heart ).

I'm wired, pierced — the monitor's green line

snaggles and bleeps, the i.v. drips heparin
into the back of my hand. The old man
in the next bed doesn't look so good,

pinched in the t.v.'s mushroom light.

There's nothing on in the next life, either —
all Charlton Heston, all the time.

Inheritance. Karma. What I deserve.

Old Invisible walks the halls,
shakes up his jar of souls, peers in.

My heart is a fluttering, naked thing.

It wants to leap from its lattice of ribs,
fly down the corridor, never come back.

Gossamer, lace — the skin that keeps
this world from leaking into the next.

One minute you're forking a cube

of green Jell-O; next you're motoring off
in your ghost car, turn signal blinking.

I want to come back as a harbor seal.

I want to catch a glittering fish in my teeth,
sleep all afternoon on the sand. October,

twilight, sunset burnt to its last magenta strip
I'll be the dark, inquisitive head in the swell.
Old friend, I'll say. Unzip that earnest skin.

The water's cold. Come swim with me.

jean Valentine

GO CLEAR

Go clear he said

his high grey 19th c.
postmortem jaw

I loved it its high greyness

go clear no touch

but words no more

death fear

I swam

out of the streaming ikon eyes

who loved me: not-me: no more care

I left the clothes

standing there I swam

into swarming projectless air

redemptionless

from under the earth to over the earth
air to not air

Dannye Romine Powell

WAKE THE TREE

the tree inside you.

Climb to the top

and see the tall buildings.

They are swaying

in the breeze. They

catch the sun

and gleam. A fleecing

of green covers you, your arms

make a V as if you're lifting

a gray branch to the sky.

Your father stands below
with his camera. He wants
to catch you before you fall
into your mother, into
your woman flesh. Today
you are made of sticks,
lust a leaf pile
behind the wall.

He likes you

this way, before

it all happens, before

the fattening and the blood.

Hold still, he says,

the grass is asleep,

the sky enameled with girl.

AFTER SORROW

The creek stitches
through the park

a mystery
its beginning

where wet first sought wet

from this bridge
we drop our string
of sorrows

down into the drift

where they become
loose and buoyant

sailing past leaves
that try to trap
their float

toward the vaster blue

we didn't imagine
they could navigate
with such ease

never dreamed
they'd fall in love
with each other

rent an apartment
with a view

grow geraniums
on the balcony

throw buckets of suds
across the tile floor

get down on their knees
to scrub

before finding the lace cloth
and lighting candles

call it lack of imagination

we stroll home
bereft

our backs to the moon

Michael Chitwood

HIS GRATITUDE

Women still wed to the living bring casseroles in disposable tins.
When he's finished, he puts them down for the dog
whose licking rattles the tin across the hardwood.

It's a sound like a barn roof when the barn has burned
and the wind comes for the rusted remains, like children
jumping on the hood of a junked car, like static
when the station's gone but the volume's still high.

It is everything he has to say, the work of the tongue
pushing the container across the floor for its next-to-nothings.

OSCILLATING FAN

A relic from the time before AC,
when the heat, even in the dark,
was something nearly visible.

It is making a slow "No."

At one extreme the months are rifled.
Enter, orange and yellow October.

It pans and

the pages are turned in the Bible
left out after the morning devotional.

This thing has a certain passage in mind,
a sentry, checking first the days
and then Deuteronomy.

On the one hand, there's Pilate.

On the other, it's Christmas.

The months preen, adjust their feathers.

The leaves seem to regret their turning.

David, Solomon, September,

the date oil and arrival of the swallows.

Now hurricane season begins
and Pharaoh's army is swept away.

The breeze thumbs up the gospel

and then gets back to a Thursday in June,
creeks loud with runoff, sudden sky,
the light just now let be.

Billy Collins

VELOCITY

In the clubcar that morning I had my notebook
open on my lap and my pen uncapped,
looking every inch the writer

right down to the little writer's frown on my face,

but there was nothing to write about
except life and death

and the low warning sound of the train whistle.

I did not want to write about all the scenery

that was flashing past, cows spread over a pasture,

hay rolled up meticulously —

things you see once and will never see again.

So I kept my pen moving by drawing

over and over again

the face of a motorcyclist in profile —

for no reason I can think of —
a biker with sunglasses and a weak chin,
leaning forward, helmetless,

his long thin hair trailing behind him in the wind.

I also drew many lines to indicate speed,
to show the air becoming visible
as it broke over the biker's face

the way it was breaking over the face
of the locomotive that was pulling me
toward Omaha and whatever lay beyond Omaha
for me, all the other stops to make

before the time would arrive to stop for good.

We must always look at things
from the point of view of eternity,

the college theologians used to insist,
from which, I imagine, we would all
appear to have speed lines trailing behind us
as we rushed along the road of the world,

as we rushed down the long tunnel of time —
the biker, of course, drunk on the wind,
but also the man reading by a fire,

speed lines coming off his shoulders and his book,

and the woman standing on a beach

studying the curve of horizon,

even the child asleep on a summer night,

speed lines flying from the posters of her bed,

from the white tips of the pillow cases,

and from the edges of her perfectly motionless body.

THE GREAT WALTER PATER

In the middle of the formal gardens,
laid out with fastidious symmetry
behind the gray stone chateau,
right at the center

where all the gravel paths lead the eye,

at the point where all the hedges

and the vivid flower beds converge

is a small rectangular pond with a flagstone edge,

and in the center of that pond is a statue

of a naked boy holding a jar on one shoulder,

and from the mouth of that jar

a fine stream of water issues forth night and day.

I never for a minute wanted

to be a nightingale or a skylark

or a figure immobilized on the slope of an urn,

but when the dogs of trouble

have me running down a dark winding alley,

I would not mind being that boy —

or, if that is not possible,

I would choose, like the great Walter Pater,
to be one of the large, orange carp
that live under the surface of that pond,
swimming back and forth all summer long
in the watery glitter of sinking coins
and resting all winter, barely moving,
under a smooth, translucent sheet of ice.

ABSENCE

This morning as low clouds
skidded over the spires of the city

I found next to a bench

in a park an ivory chess piece —

the white knight as it turned out —
and in the pigeon-ruffling wind

I wondered where all the others were,
lined up somewhere

on their red and black squares,
many of them feeling uneasy

about the salt shaker
that was taking his place,

and all of them secretly longing
for the moment

when the white horse
would reappear out of nowhere

and advance toward the board
with his distinctive motion,

stepping forward, then sideways
before advancing again,

the moves I was making him do
over and over in my palm.

D. Nurkse

SECOND MARRIAGE

We were coaxing each other to paradise
and also locked in a game of chess
— each cheating to lose.

Among the caresses
there was one we withheld
with great pride and cunning,
and among the names we called,
incandescent with loss,
some were just cries.

Always the cat watched,
switched the tip of her tail,
and licked one paw,
then the other.

On Court Street, steps receded,
and the cries of children
mimicked each other,
stupid, stupid,
absurdly faint and clear.

The clock ticked scrupulously
as if hoarding a treasure.

Radio music vanished

sad or ecstatic —

all we heard was silence.

We'd come to the world
without us — wrinkled sheet,
bright fading stain,
empty room filling with dawn,
two cloudy wine glasses
touching at base and rim.

A PUZZLE AT SAINT LUKE'S

The sky is the hard part:
no landmark, just the contour
of the next piece,

and does it help that the old man

with the tremor is so shy

he just waits, and waiting suits him,

and it's still snowing

in a high oblique window,

so that the light also trembles?

We want to finish

so we can be released

and wake in our own beds —

we who are almost whole,
almost ourselves, almost foreign
to these absurd back-slit gowns:

and now his lips shake,
framing a word, always the same,
as if that gap were home.

Franz Wright

THANKS PRAYER AT THE COVE

A year ago today

I was unable to speak

one syntactically coherent

thought let alone write it down: today

in the dear and absurdly allegorical place

by your grace

I am here

and not in that graveyard, its skyline

visible now from the November leaflessness

and I am here to say

it's 5 o'clock, too late to write more

(especially for the one whose eyes

are starting to get dark), the single

dispirited swan out on the windless brown

transparent floor floating

gradually backward

blackward

no this is what I still

can see, white

as a joint in a box of little cigars —
and where is the mate
Lord, it is almost winter in the year
2000 and now I look up to find five
practically unseeable mallards at my feet
they have crossed

nearly standing on earth they're so close
looking up to me
for bread —

that's what my eyes of flesh see (barely)
but what I wished to say
is this, listen:
a year ago today

1 found myself riding the subway psychotic
(I vvasn t depressed, I wanted to rip mv face off)
unable to write what I thought, which was nothing

though I tried though I finally stopped trying and looked up

at the face of the man

directly across from me, and it began

to melt before my eyes

and in an instant it was young again

the face he must have had

once when he was five

and in an instant it happened again only this time
it changed to the face of his elderly
corpse and back in time
it changed

to his face at our present
moment of time's flowing and then
as if transparently

superimposed I saw them all at once
Ok I was insane but how insane
can someone be I thought, I did not
know you then

I didn't know you were there God
(that's what we call you, grunt grunt)
as you are at every moment
everywhere of what we call
the future and the past
And then I tried once more
experimentally
I focused

on another's face, no need to describe it

there is only one

underneath

these scary and extremely

realistic rubber masks

and there is as I also know now

by your grace one

and only one person on earth

beneath a certain depth

the terror and the love

are one, like hunger, same

in everyone

and it happened again, das Ungliick geschah

you might say nur mir allein it happened

no matter who I looked at

for maybe five minutes long enough

long enough

this secret trinity

I saw, the others

will say I am making it up

as if that mattered

Lord,

I make up nothing
not one word.

THE WORD

Like a third set of teeth
or side in a chess match

Thought

and most mysterious
of all, the
matter of thought

the mortal mind thinking
deathless things,
singing

See at it examining
black grains of death
and life — they are the same
thing —

in its open hand

Sweet black green-shadowed grains of soil:
When no one is looking

see it secretly

taste one.

HOMAGE

There are a few things I will miss,
a girl with no shirt on
lighting a cigarette

and brushing her hair in the mirror
the sound of a mailbox
opening, somewhere,

and dosing at two in the morning

of the first snow,

and the words for them.

Mark Irwin

PASSING

It is now this late evening in April

among first irises and bees I realize

they were opening doors Mary Robert

and William I want to say of clouds sunlight

rain now Didn't we notice the arrows

of hearts hands leaping toward an unmapped

when No age no place though all of one

light Somewhere beneath that cloud

in a little town a white door is opening

maybe for nothing but wind but we will all

one day be there I mean when opening is finally enough

NOVEMBER

Now across the fields there's a wall of gold,
and evenings, if you listen closely enough,
there are faint horn and trumpet sounds.

It's the sun moving through grass
reflecting toward cloud, as the buttery
light of the straw says, "Lay
me down." A boy, invisible to most, is
carrying a plate of brass toward you.

Font of what? And you would like to fill
your pockets with a glow blurring all
specifics with its shine. Hurry, please,
for the boy's growing older. Look, already
there are wrinkles on his hands, around
his eyes. He would like to give you
what you will never entirely have. And
what is that ringing you can feel?

Marianne Baruch

1 IMAGINE THE MORTICIAN

I imagine a mortician looks at the hands

first, the lines up toward the fingers,

then down toward the fleshy parts, how

one crevice crosses at an angle

and stops. I imagine this on a summer day.

Or I imagine myself walking early morning,

really early, when it's still half dark,

imagining with each step that poor

mortician in some cool room across town

faced with a slug of a thing — no one

he knows — merely weight now. Or perhaps

I was walking, but the thought

stopped me. I didn't dare

look at my hand, its own

scattered lines, webs that go nowhere.

But the mortician? Probably
a bored one too, one who half-hates
his job, whose father and grandfather
made him, he had no choice, not really,
though the hands — they are
interesting, aren't they? It might be
a hobby of his that perks up the whole
awful business, gauging the lifeline
against the real life, watching the years
stop short, then bringing the body
back to the world in his dream
of that body, flashing it back to the yard,
bright sun, garden shears, blackberries.

I walked this morning — that's

the truth of it. How was I to know? The air

only gradually gave up its dark. My mind —

only birdsong entered, sound

like pebbles tied together with string

and trailing off. So I let

the mortician in

with his bent curiosity, the reverse
of the new mother who counts
all the toes and fingers
and is so relieved.

MY UNCLE WHO HATED ZOOS IS

at the zoo — okay: orangutans, albatross, a lion
perfectly bored in her stretch. To that
he closes his book.

How long have I

been dead?

Years, I say because reasonable wants
reasonable. Fif-teen-years — dramatic, distinct, three
stresses adrift in silence.

And my wife?

Virginia? I say.

And my house?

A beautiful house, Uncle
though I never saw the last one. Was it
beautiful? Is a squid beautiful?

Is the unbearable reptile whose name —
some tangle in Latin — I can't even pronounce?

I keep nodding. Things get darker

in autumn. You say things anyway, exactly like

leaves do their fall thing

assbackwards in wind, billowing up

after coming straight down. You'd think

they'd stay put. And those trees in the distance.

I'm squinting to read them, their one bright
sadness at a time.

My book! he's

almost shouting over the wide creature racket
of this place, the honk honking, the caw
cawing. He looks down, quiet.

And honest to god, my dead uncle's
reading — say it's Gulliver's Travels. Or say
my dead uncle's on page 72
of Ulysses. I'll tell you this: my dead uncle
loves Ambrose Bierce.

Uncle? But he's lost to me now.
Do the dead forget? Is it like me

in a dream once, telling my one sweet cat —
Go on, go home now. I already have
a cat. Forget , to forget, this forgetting thing
all over the place.

I look it up. "To cease

from doing." But one does that, right? One

"ceases from doing." You do

to do not. Inedible phrase!

Dreamsick oxymoron!

ie: Forget

the house. He's the one

who's beautiful, sitting there in his bathrobe
as if this were a porch, a veranda, a certain
rest-his-soul lanai
near a landslide or something.

SMALL YARDS

To get the whole world in there: not just
the mold-sweet birdbath, dry since June. Not simply
the plastic deer broken at the knee,
hoisted to its heroic stance

by a large, rather unpleasant-looking, pockmarked
rock. The world is

richer, way beyond the young man — black or white —

red tails and cap, racist-tacky

or merely tacky, forever offering his lantern

to these autumn days. And what about those

multiple, multi-colored pinwheels

lined up against the weather? Or the shadow guy?

A cutout, no expression, no soul
or whatever passes for it

as he putts the ball across the stillborn, never-
to-be-green concrete of some driveway. A sandtrap?

An imagined sandtrap? He's hopeful still,
if you need a narration. And then, next door
(a sale one time? a 2 for 1?) another shadow guy
climbs a ladder nowhere, his flattest
of brushes raised to paint nothing really, the eternal
bliss of the about-to-be, etcetera, etcetera, world
upon world. Because the whole world
is never whole. Didn't I

know that? But those pink flamingoes. Or the twisted
bonsai, tortured into beauty and grace. Grace!

To get that you might wish a lifetime

at the little well with its little wooden bucket

wound up tight, its depth not

a lake's but a pocket's. A pocket? Magical, who-knows-
what-one-might-find-there, a pocket's
good, yes? It will do, yes? Answer: no.

Answer: I'm just

in my car sometimes. And I see things.

Sondra Upham

PLASTER OF PARIS HANDS IN A GLASS CASE
IN THE HAND SURGEON'S WAITING ROOM

As if the teacher has just asked,

Who wants to erase the blackboards?

and they all do, in their various ways —

ring and middle fingers inseparable, double thumbs,

fingers curled to ram's horns

or grown too long — a rampant branch,

or four, split into two's —

the V in a divining rod.

Across the room, a woman
reads a storybook to her boy.

The father, who's missing a hand,
whose thumb blooms
from the white of his wrist,
runs that thumb

up his son's bare arm and down again,
as if he were touching a sacred manuscript,
or his grandmother's opal earrings,
discovered in a cufflink box —
such is his delight.

The boy pays attention to his mother's voice,
as though nothing remarkable were happening,
the father, registering what a hand can do —

This hand. This hand per se.

AT THE THEATRE

When the killer points his gun at her,
the actress, who has no lines for now,
grimaces, tries a helpless grin,
grimaces again, desperate to portray fear.

Her eyebrows shoot up, down, up.

She really wants to get it right.

She's frantic, in fact, like someone ransacking
a bedroom, emptying drawers, pants pockets,
waste baskets in search of a lost wallet.

She wonders why she thought she could act.
Her face goes blank — a stag,
snagged by a bullet, sucking in air.

She knows she's close now.

Her loneliness is making her giddy.

She almost laughs.

THAT SUMMER

Ah, the order of our days —

Nowell on my hip as we walked the beach

past the fifth jetty and back,

our bath and his nap by two,

him in his seat on the back of my bike,

calling, man , man

as we passed the small fisherman

in a yellow raincoat

on the roof of 37 Nashua Street.

A stop at Hilliard's for peanut butter fudge.

A story on the porch in the hammock before bed.
The wait for First Star —

But no,

those are the rapist's eyes
I'm remembering, shining
like a shot glass
through the nylon stocking
that lopsided his face.

This is how it is with me —

I can have all of it or none of it.

I can get in the cart and go down
into the mine,

to the candlelit ore and quartz,
or stand back, too far to see.

Venus Khoury-Ghata

"MY MOTHER WHO RECALLED A BLURRED-OVER DEATH"

My mother who recalled a blurred-over death
said that the light was stubborn

and embarrassed the crowd which turned its back on her

on the dim landing where voices bustled
her body plunged in grief separated itself from the bedding
the creaking of the floorboards revealed the movements of
floor-buffing angels

tedious preparations for one who pursued her breath barking
a sympathetic hand flung a stone at her across a sob

My mother had paired her basil with the forest oak
inviting it Easter after Easter to share the lamb's grass and
bleating

and to verify against its height if we had grown along with
the lamp

which pushed the sun back behind the hedges
when maternal fingers tucked up a lock of wavy hair

The shutters looked regretful
when my mother read the cards for the night
the king of hearts atop the ten of diamonds
meant moving

the jack of clubs who was afraid of dying
kept his distance from the queen of spades
whom he only knew by her profile

The house was on the edge of the road as on the edge of tears
its windows ready to burst into sobs

101

"THE SALT MY MOTHER TOSSED IN HER OVEN"

The salt my mother tossed in her oven

unleashed flame-tongues

and stretched our bodies as far

as Lake Baikal

the banks of the Euphrates

and the Amazon

We had brought back blue toucans in our hair
breadfruit trees between our teeth

we had eaten acid fruit which made the table screw up its face
chewed red grass which gave the walls hallucinations

In my mother's oven the rumor-bearing winds set on each other
the Amazon's rivers immolated themselves in the Atlantic
the bells of Tibet strangled in their own ropes

we listened to all the grievances
we sympathized

102

"WE STOLE KISSES FROM THE HOLY PICTURES"

We stole kisses from the holy pictures
hasty embraces from the cherry tree
plumes from the fog seated on our doorstep

We were highwaymen in the dry season

petty thieves in the rainy season when rivers climbed into our
bedrooms

we had committed numerous pilferings with angel accomplices

stolen sticks of incense from the cypress

chalk from the dawn

tears from the cemetery walls

We were grandiloquent fabulists
we uprooted minutes from the clock
and recited our ages backwards

103

"ALL LOGIC'S ORDER MELTED WITH THE ROOF

All logic's order melted with the roof
we applauded the rain falling between our walls
fervently mended rips in the spider-webs

We were fetishists
irreverent

my mother read the cards for mockingbirds

my father slapped the sand

slapped God

when the clouds bled

on the bent back of the sky

Our salvation came from nature

we would trap the rednesses of autumn

the destitution of winter

we would end up in tendrils

in firewood-bundles

to affront the brief rage of the conifers

translated by Marilyn Hacker

104

Martha Zweig

MISTRESS HERE

Old underbitch gets a
biscuit, yah my new tricks
rivet the kids, as if a
God granted prayers, a
pony instantly bedside, the
bully next door burst into flames.

They adore me & tug me

quick upstairs to their inscrutable rooms.

Thus does my tenure already

turn to the good. It keeps a

wife pleased as well below at her stitch,

a motto coming along into its own

curly letters entwined. What a

flourish of charities begins

at this home in her name! She will

kiss & primp them & bustle each abroad.

On the contrary ,

not the half of it;

hand over quaint hand old

mother-smitten invisible

sister help haul the buckets up of our

heart blinking cheeky frogs: I'm

paying you for it in real children.

105

WIDOWWALK

Find what's left of him derelict, ready
to rig for moonlight and the exotic flags,
now that successions of snails
lay gloss along the ribcage his pride
had once to ride in. Whitewash work
some few weeks yet, then set him sail.

Season of inflammation

in the canopy, leaves in tailspins,

augury of cargo into every bone hold

hoist and fast, bright

maple lading, the Indian pipe,

sometimes a toad,

and the pomanders of gall and balm:
accurately the rain weighs and stows.
Easy does his most intimate drudgery —
were it I so busy, belovedly;
as it is, care and courtesy
of the hired spider,

and a brisk North wind

to rabblerouse among the wild geese,

strong and splendid arrivals

who wobble our poor pond, preening

the luck from his broken hair

into their wings.

GENERATIONS

For death mother had to leave off dying.
Her other unfinished works — & I
myself among them — that she hadn't
quite kept up, evidently would never do.
I spelled her last notes to one another
& over repeatedly for any clue.

Some years later, freak-accidental
intuition caught my heart, that I'd quit
my own peculiar daughter:

I tended, instead, some likelier one
she was once or wasn't, figment of mine.
I picked up exactly the dear thread.

107

Deborah Bogen

VISITATION

Small knots of form, grey against
grey,

an unnerving calm at the window,

long crows

not going anywhere.

Everything concentrated like
metal in the blood.

The dead lose their ages,
their eyelashes,
their bright ideas.

Shiny fingers curl

as if they want me to hear something.
Maybe a joke.

2 08

Thorpie Moeckel

POEM WITH BRAIDS IN IT

No more consonants, now, the alphabet
is pure vowel, and geese
waddle west in this mud,

this soft serve, opening their wings
now and then, as if to say,
in their aloey jargon,

who's boss. Already

a balmy phonics descends; the locust blossoms,
those pea-shaped buggers, those

millennium falcons, swim
through its trickster palette, looking
for the tea in which the world steeps,

in which noise

chases noise through lives

haunted by new flaws, new flaccidities

and an honest, down-

to-earth rain. Meanwhile, up-country,

between the oaks,

the ostrich ferns offer their ancient scrolls
with flimsical precision,

& Little Dogwood Creek braids

its bubbly logistics, pummeling
the azalea clean
as sleep, or the impulse

to reveal the impulse

by running from it. Here's

to the basket-weave of the greenbriar.

109

Here's to the indian cucumber's split-level rendering
of starfish. Here's to the tumbledown acoustics,
the caddisfly, the constant

participling. Here's

to the carnal life, the leaves

folded like dozing bats.

SKINK

I watched you

change colors in the Florida sun.

Your quickness blistered me,
the throb in your jowl,

how your toes clung to wall and screen alike.

But then your tail was my youth

and I wanted it. Some kind of cave

collapsed in me. I saw

the day-glo newts

that saved me in the woods

where I tried to die.

I saw the hellbender, which I've looked for,

looked for, and never seen,

and the dusky and spotted salamanders.

At once it seemed you were the handwriting

on a document I'd have read to me

by some official of the government, or doctor,

the fine print. I saw you

look at my daughter each time

she sighed, and did not offer her to you.

It was clear that the darts

in your skull were the same as my father's,

and mine. Resemblances,

so what. I did not begrudge

that later you would sleep

buried to your ears

in Spanish moss. I did not even wonder,
reptile, if it would be green or red,
your tail, strung on a line
around my neck,

or just that strange, courteous yellow.

Ill

Amy Schroeder

RIGHT, RIGHTER, RIGHTEST

My friend hisses

"No one thing can be all things to a person,"

and then looks at me,

sideways.

I think,

"Well, I never wanted it to be all —
just much communion,
movie love, and mimsy..."

That you wanted to be left alone,

that you wanted to be a part of something —

How weak you are,

caught always with your sour face and sore wrist,
just another limp leaf on the clematis vine.

A writer.

III

The girl reclines. She leans, lee of the stone, la la la,
lean-to shack built up against the lie of the house.

Tar paper and cut-bits of cardboard: Ketchup. Green Beans. Toilet
paper.

She thinks she is better than everyone else.

She may be right.

The frog leaps out of water;
the water falls back on itself.

122

HOMESICK

Her mother misusing the word elegiac ;
her father calling himself stupid —

She runs a tongue over her teeth, thinking
anchorite, cenobite, bite dozen —

Corn on the cob, pork loin, tri-tip roast; fish, never.

The dog on the lawn, humping his pillow.

The back yard: eugenias and junipers,
browning fescue. Avocados,
azaleas dying in-to-out,
eight star sky.

The house, the house, the house.

John the Baptist ate bugs, she says to no one in particular.

Locusts, I think.

She was one of, and her sister beside,
giggling in and out. Breathing.

Winstons held beneath the table, smoke blown to the side.
Flower arranging — a large spiky blue flower
no one knew the name of, looked like a peacock,
or like the jay that used to snipe at the cat,
actually plucking tufts like a crane diving for fish.

Someone slips on the mossy bricks. Someone laughs.

Someone blows out the candles, turns on the Jacuzzi,
models the new clothes. Someone covers her mouth.

Way back then, when we used to fight, she thinks, at least then zee . . .

Dessert. Desert. Be certain.

113

Angela Ball

OUR INSTITUTE OF THE SUPERFICIAL

Surfaces are wonderful, wonderful to look at people
Without knowing them.

To know shapes, instead:

A tree which begins to resemble lightning,

A stately garbage can, a man walking along in pants
Made of billows of inky stripes
Like a dream jail, a sunset that surrounds us
With party cake.

There are tarps I could lift,

But don't. I'd rather drape

All information with a crisp napkin.

Why think in

When you can think around,

In swoops that grow only more extravagant.

From now, whatever happens
Will be secretary of your heart:

A continuous backbone of trains — or, overhead, an airplane
Prolonging its famous gutter-ball sound.

For your studies, you 11 search endlessly, happily, greedily
For the subject that snatches all subjects, knocks them flat.

114

OUR BIG RIVER

Living next to our river is like living next to thoughts.
Pouring day and night, glaucous.

Skin crawls this way and that
Without our knowing it.

Because we needed objectivity,

A power plant was built.

All the famous painters submitted their designs.

De Chirico won. It is his summer and winter home.

With its wild tunnel through air
And its special plaster.

Now we can name the stars: Elmer White, Bernice Burns, etc..
As the case may be, and receive
A special certificate.

Now we can see how the world gets divided:

Light and smoke.

We're going with the smoke.

115

Beckian Fritz Goldberg

ONE MORE

Say I had
a calf

I had to guide through the city,
old snow

in the curbs and fresh
nakedness on the branches
of each

fenced-off tree along
the avenues, black man
repeating to no one, everyone.
You got a problem?

You got a problem?

Leading a dewy-eyed young
calf through the traffic,
bastards

staring into its
lake-silt eye, one

then the other,

isn't a cakewalk, isn't

a walk in the park, isn't going

anywhere

among the strange bawling
of cars, water-trucks,
horns. Here,

say to it, say to it,
one more look.

One more look and
we must go.

116

WREN

Once I fished a wren
from the pool
held it

little volt
in my hand

This I won't forget:

my mother's shoulders

I'm in the backseat
holding my brother's hand

my sister is driving

I don't have to see
anyone's face

the box of ashes
queerly heavy
like metal

the soaked sleeve of your sweater
long ago

the way something would rather drown
than trust

the hand that would lift it

117

ANSWER

Yes, I'd go back —

to the day
I was almost born
to the false alarm

that brought a cop
to the motel room
to wake my father

and to the night drive
through the spring snowfall

black outside

a little blue light on the dash

but it was Not
Yet —

it was Too Soon —

I was born in May,

but I would leave them there

with the breath and the April snow
with the waiting
with the beginning

my happiness
so great

I'd never come . . .

118

Lee Upton

COLERIDGE, AGAIN

"For he on honey-dew hath fed,
and drunk the milk of paradise."

First it's a palace with wine at bedside.

And then it's a square of canvas
and the dregs of a Harvey Wallbanger.

At first it's the milk of paradise,
and then it's paradise milked.

It's honey dew and it's honey did and it's honey don't.

It's not the first time he has slept and dreamed

and awakened from a vision,

a nervous passenger

reading too much

into the flight literature.

A hand knocks.

The planet reels.

The pleasure palaces ride into place.

The mind's mirror tips and flashes
toward the roof of his mouth.

The dream's honey flows over his tongue.

The art of poetry is the art of the interruption.

119

WOMEN WITH PUTTI

As if they're attachments,
fleshlies.

They're not children so much as sentient
buttocks that float or
her future embryos,
charging, insistent. . . .

These companions

look out of the whole oily business,

these soft cloven hooves

turned inside out,

these most buoyant citizens,

their soft hands paddling the canvas

of their lovely grandame.

To look is to

fund a bank of them,

anarchists armed with bows and arrows at the gullet,

honeyed to every pore with mischief,

dimpled with incipient knowledge,

not a death's head

but a life's head:

the very tips of the nervous system unfurled unclenched
blossomed and given
intelligence.

INDISPENSABLE SIGN

Under the bank of fountains
in the cavern

between the rounded steps some man

is — what can I say —
showing himself to us?

The funny way we say it:

exposing himself,

as if he were a strip of film.

I had been staring into the distance

and drew up startled.

A sign beneath the stone pediments.
The perch of meaning.

One interjection. One more
dying argument.

How many bodies are piled

on a field, or a bed,
before a language curls like
a million fernheads?

How many turnings,
how much urgent mayhem
to make a culture?

727

CONTRIBUTORS

ANGELA BALL'S most recent
book is The Museum of the
Revolution (Carnegie Mellon,
1999). She teaches in the Center
for Writers at the University of
Southern Mississippi, where
she is an editor for the Missis¬
sippi Review.

DEBORAH BOGEN has recent¬
ly moved to Pittsburgh.

MARIANNE BORUCH has
two collections in print with
Oberlin College Press: Moss
Burning and A Stick That
Breaks and Breaks. She teach¬
es in the Writing Program at
Purdue University.

MICHAEL CHITWOOD'S most
recent book is The Weave Room,
from University of Chicago Press.

BILLY COLLINS's latest collec¬
tion of poetry is Picnic, Light¬
ning, from Pittsburgh. Next
year Random House will pub¬
lish his new and selected
poems. Sailing Alone Around
the Room.

BECKIAN FRITZ GOLD¬
BERG s most recent collections
are Never Be the Horse (Uni¬
versity of Akron Press, 1999),
reviewed in FIELD 62, and
Twentieth Century Children,
a chapbook, from Graphic De¬
sign Press at Indiana Universi¬
ty (1999). She currently directs

the Creative Writing Program
at Arizona State University.

MARK IRWIN's fourth collec¬
tion, White City, was pub¬
lished last spring by BOA. He
is a visiting poet at the Univer¬
sity of Colorado/Boulder.

VENUS KHOURY-GHATA,
whose work appeared in
FIELD 62 as well, will be the
subject of the next volume in
the FIELD Translation Series.
Her translator, MARILYN
HACKER, has put together
several of her sequences under
the title Here There Was Once
A Country.

JON LOOMIS is the author of
Vanitas Motel (Oberlin Col¬
lege Press), winner of the 1997
FIELD Poetry Prize. He writes
that he is currently sweating it
out in Atlanta, where he is a
visiting poet at Emory Univer¬
sity.

THORPE MOECKEL is cur¬
rently teaching and writing at
the University of Virginia. His
work has appeared several
times in these pages.

CAROL MUSKE is the author
of An Octave Above Thunder:
New and Selected Poems

(Penguin). She teaches at the
University of Southern Califor¬
nia.

122

D. NURKSE's fifth book. Leav¬
ing Xaia (Four Way Books) ap¬
peared in 2000; forthcoming is
The Rules of Paradise (also
from Four Way Books). He is
the recipient of the 1998 Bess
Hokin Prize from Poetry, and
1999 and 2000 awards from the
New York Foundation for the
Arts.

DANNYE ROMINE POWELL
is a reporter with the Charlotte,
NC, Observer. Her first collec¬
tion, At Every Wedding Some¬
one Stays Home, won the Uni¬
versity of Arkansas First Book
Award in 1994.

AMY SCHROEDER recently
received her M.F.A. from
Washington University in St.
Louis. She lives in California.

ERIC TORGERSEN's Dear
Friend: Rainer Maria Rilke
and Paula Modersohn-Becker

is now out in paperback from
Northwestern University
Press. He has published four
books of poems, a novella, and
numerous essays on contempo¬
rary poetry, and is now work¬
ing on a new catalog of Paula
Modersohn-Becker's work. He
teaches at the University of
Central Michigan.

SONDRA UPHAM has an M.A.
from the University of Massa¬

chusetts in Boston. She is a
poet-in-the-schools in Massa¬
chusetts and Arizona. Her
work has appeared in many lit¬
erary magazines, including
Prairie Schooner, The New Vir¬
ginia Review, and Phoebe.

LEE UPTON's fourth book of
poems. Civilian Histories, ap¬
peared last spring from the
University of Georgia Press.

JEAN VALENTINE is the au¬
thor of eight books of poetry,
most recently The Cradle of
the Real Life (Wesleyan, 2000).
She lives and works in New
York City.

CHARLES WRIGHT's newest
collection is Negative Blue:
Selected Later Poems, out last
spring from Farrar, Straus &
Giroux.

FRANZ WRIGHT's new collec¬
tion, The Beforelife, will ap¬
pear from Knopf in January.
His new and selected poems.
Ill Lit, is available from Ober-
lin College Press.

MARTHA ZWEIG's first collec¬
tion, Vinegar Bone, appeared
from Wesleyan University
Press in 1999. She received a
1999 Writer's Award from the
Mrs. Giles Whiting Foundation.

223

that notes on two contributors to the Spring 2000 issue

We regret
were omitted:

KATHY FAGAN is the author
of the National Poetry Series
selection. The Raft (1985), and
most recently. Moving & St.
Rage (1999), winner of the 1998
Vassar Miller Prize for Poetry.
She teaches at Ohio State Uni¬
versity, where she also co-edits
The Journal.

KARY WAYSON lives in Seat¬
tle, where she works as a wait¬
ress and as the assistant to the
marketing and publicity man¬
ager at Seal Press.

124

$700

ISSN: 0015-0657

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